CHRISTMAS 2015
Your Ancestors Your History
www.family-tree.co.uk
New *eensiis* online
V
Game-changers of 2015
Key genealogy releases and
exciting developments from
the family history world
e Discover your ancestor
on the eve of war
e Get to grips with the latest ^
bumper family history collection
e 29 million people to search |H
Carta
Magna
connection - how I traced
back to a medieval baron
• More problem-solving
solutions - the benefits of
the broad-brush approach
• Plus: party frocks,
Christmas puddings &
cracking reader stories
How blue is
your blood?
The British royal
family and its
thousands of
distant relations
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CONTENTS
6 Family history news
Latest news with Belinda Griffin,
including the release of the 1939
Register and how to access our FREE
digital data from TheGenealogist.
10 A game-changing year of
genealogy
Chris Paton looks back at the very
best 2015 had to offer genealogists.
14 Dear Tom-
Get your monthly fix of genealogical
gems and funnies with Tom Wood.
18 Benefits of the broad-bush
approach
Discover new search methods to
track down your elusive ancestors
with part 3 of David Annal’s series on
problem solving for family historians.
23 Searching the 1939 Register
Find out how to use the 1939 Register
to learn more about your family at the
start of WW2, with Helen Tovey.
26 I’ve found my ancestors in
the 1939 Register: What do
I do now?
Emma Jolly explains how to make the
most of your discoveries in the 1939
Register to further your research.
Enclosures, tithes & Tilleys
David Lewiston Sharpe explores
how changes in the agricultural
landscape of the 19th century
propelled ag lab ancestors to London.
A spa that time forgot
Step into the world of spas as Sue
Hassett traces an ancestor living at a
mystery address on the 1851 Census.
Stories of everyday folk
Follow Barbara Fox’s fabulous tips
on writing an ancestral story everyone
will want to read, as she shares tales
of her mother’s travelling adventures.
The tale of a veil
When Caroline Makein inherited
a beautiful bridal veil, she became
fascinated by the story behind it...
Calling all Family Tree
subscribers
Win books worth over £60 this issue!
See how the 1 939
Register can help
you track down
your ancestors in
the early days of
WW2.
Family Tree is
printed in the UK.
uk
30
34
36
42
Christmas 2015 Vol 32 No 3
^
j — JL ± Ai* ^ <
Christmas 2015 Famil^^rree 3
CONTENTS
Christmas 2015 Vol 32 No 3
46 Subscribe, save & get a gift!
More great reasons to subscribe to
Family Tree - save on the cover price
and get a family history kit for free!
48 My personal Magna Carta
connection
Jeffrey Wayne Seemans explains
how he identified an ancestral link to
the mighty Magna Carta.
50 3-month Gold subscription
FREE for every reader!
Take advantage of a free subscription
to TheGenealogist worth £24.95!
Laura Berry tells us what’s on offer.
52 Christmas treats!
Karen Clare picks some Christmas
reads for under your tree.
54 The spice of life
Ruth A Symes takes a delicious look
at the history of the Christmas pud.
58 The backbone of genealogy
Join Anthony Adolph as he delves
deeply into royal genealogy.
64 How far are you related to
royalty?
Richard Morgan weighs up the odds
of finding blue blood.
67 Gift subscription just £19
Give your loved one a six-month gift
subscription to Family Tree.
68 Cold case
Anna Maria Barry seeks out the
story of a musician’s untimely death.
71 Twiglets
Join our tree-tracing diarist Gill Shaw
on the next step of her journey.
72 Treasure albums
Take a leaf out of Susan Brewer’s
book and see what your ancestors’
autograph albums can reveal.
74 Put on your glad rags!
Join Jayne Shrimpton for a look at
beautiful evening wear of the past fit
for a Christmas ball.
80 Your Q&A: advice
Break down your brickwalls with
Mary Evans, Jayne Shrimpton, Tim
Lovering, David Frost, David Annal,
Simon Wills and Richard Morgan.
88 Long live the king?
In Research Zone, Simon Wills
quizzes Ivan Fowler, who is part of an
intriguing Edward II study project...
90 Mailbox
Lively letters from our readers, and
Keith Gregson’s Snippets of War.
92 Coming next in Family Tree
A sneak peek at our January issue!
93 Your adverts
98 Thoughts on...
Diane Lindsay pictures her family
during the first Christmas of WW2.
4 Familyritee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
ABM/®
EDITORIAL
Assistant Editor - Karen Clare
karen.c@family-tree.co.uk
Digital Editor - Belinda Griffin
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w ww.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
Welcome
Near the end of another exciting
year for family history we look back
at the key developments and at the
latest addition, the 1939 Register
W ell this year is ending in a flourish, with the long-awaited
1939 Register for England and Wales now online. It’s been
several years since the release of the 1911 Census returns for
England, Wales and Scotland, and it will be 2022 before we
can tackle the 1921 Census, so online access to this latest national record
set has got to be something to be relished. I’ll admit that just one of my
great-grandparents appears to be in the new database (the others seemingly
in Singapore, Ireland and Scotland). However, I have found it extremely
interesting to learn about this resource - both how it was created in the
early weeks of the Second World War, and the details we can now locate
about our ancestors within it. And by weaving our new-found knowledge
into our store of past family history discoveries, hopefully we can piece
together further clues about our families in the decades before and after
1939.
I hope you’ve all had a very enjoyable and rewarding year of family
history, and wish you good health, happy Christmas and many more
genealogy discoveries to come.
K-iw
Helen Tovey
EDITOR
helen.t@family-tree.co.uk
Get in touch with us...
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Christmas 2015 Family-rriee 5
FAMILY HISTORY NEWS
With Digital Editor Belinda Griffin. Keep up with us at www.family-tree.co.uk,
facebook.com/familytreemaguk & on Twitter ©familytreemaguk.
§•
1939 Register now online at
Findmypast.co.uk
3,739
T he eagerly awaited 1939
Register for England
and Wales is now online at
Findmypast.co.uk, launched in
association with The National
Archives.
The register offers a
fascinating snapshot of the
nation on the eve of war, while
also providing an excellent
census substitute for family
historians. Until now, the most
recent similar information
available was the 1911 Census.
Owing to the 100-year rule, the
1921 Census will not be released
until 2022, while the 1931
Census was destroyed in the
war and the 1941 Census was
never taken. The 1939 Register
therefore bridges an important
30-year gap in history.
In September 1939, when
WW2 had just broken out,
65,000 enumerators were
employed to visit every house
in England and Wales to take
stock of the civil population. The
information they recorded was
used to issue identity
cards, plan mass
evacuations, establish
rationing and more. Later,
the 1939 Register would
play a central role in the
establishment of post-war
services like the NHS.
Comprising 1.2 million
pages in 7,000 volumes and
documenting the lives of 41
million people, the 1939 Register
of England and Wales includes
the names of inhabitants at
each address, their date
of birth, marital status
and occupation.
Paul Nixon,
military expert at
Findmypast, said:
The 1939 Register
is one of the most
important documents of
modern British history. It allows
us to see where our relatives
were living, with whom and
what jobs they did at the start
of World War II. To help people
understand the period better
' on
Findmypast.co.uk includes information on the 1939 Register,
the digitisation project, and how to explore the records.
and to create a picture of our
world in 1939, we have added a
range of contextual information
to bring the records to life. Maps,
photographs, newspapers,
and infographics will
^ immerse the user
in the period and
I give a flavour of
f what life was like
for our parents or
grandparents.’
The 1939 Register
is available online only at
www.findmypast.co.uk. The
register is free to search but
there is a charge to view the
records with different pay-per-
view packages starting at £6.95.
Owing to data protection, there
will be some closed records at
the time of launch.
Commemorative events remember Battle of Jutland
A series of centenary events will be held in the
Orkney Islands on 31 May 2016 as part of the
Government’s plans to commemorate the 100th
anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, which brought
together the two most powerful naval forces of the
time in the largest sea battle of the First World War.
Secretary of State John Whittingdale said:
These commemorations will be an opportunity
for the country to come together to honour those
who lost their lives during the Battle of Jutland. The
pivotal role that the Royal Navy played in the war
• Forces War Records’ (forces-war-records.co.uk) latest
collection. Military Hospitals Admissions and Discharge
Registers WW1, has now reached half a million records.
effort cannot be underestimated and we
owe a great debt to those brave souls who
gave their lives.’
During the Battle of Jutland, which took place
in the North Sea, near Denmark, 6,000 British and
2,500 German personnel were lost. Those on all
sides who lost their lives will be honoured during
the commemorations, which will also recognise the
impact the battle had on the Orkney Islands and
the role that Orkney played in hosting the Grand
Fleet throughout the war.
• The British Newspaper Archive has passed 12.1 million images
and now has 535 titles online. See the latest releases at www.
britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/home/LatestAdditions.
6 Family'rree Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
B -A.
• Applications for the 2016 Manchester Community Histories Awards are now open. The
awards give recognition to the excellent work being done to celebrate and preserve Greater
Manchester’s histories and heritage. Visit manchesterhistoriesfestival.org.uk.
• TheGenealogist.co.uk is promising
new software, records and interfaces
for 2016 - we’ll keep you updated!
' TV documentary on look
r out for DBrticioBnts
Cousins who were successfully reunited
early this year - Jim and Kate in Scotland,
D ocumentary ‘Family Finders’ for BBC
One is looking for people who have
lost touch with family members and are
trying to reconnect with them. Programme
makers Ricochet Television would also like
to hear from those who have managed to
track down family members recently, either
independently or with the help of specialist
agencies. Each programme will follow the
process and detective work used by families
and agencies as they hunt for lost relatives,
culminating with the moment the two sides
are reunited or meet each other for the
very first time. If you’d like to get involved,
call 01273 224800 or email familyfinders®
ricochet.co.uk to share your story.
Suffolk memorial research
T WO researchers have been investigating
the 1,482 names of soldiers
remembered on the First World War
memorial at
Christchurch
Park, Ipswich,
Suffolk.
In October
2014, Helen
Ely and
Andrew Beal
began to
research the
names from
the memorial
I using the Commonwealth War Graves
I Commission (CWGC), genealogy websites
w ^ and Google. The pair are now very close
1 1 to completing profiles for each of the men,
^.2 which include wives and children, and
|@ information on the emblems, regiments and
battalions.
CD 13
@o Find out more about the project and what
I -I has been discovered at www.facebook.
1 1 com/pages/I pswich-War- Memorial-
Cenotaph/779067228815027. Get in
^ I touch with the researchers if you have any
I = information to add or relevant photographs.
New WW1 memorial unveiled in Surrey
T he Commonwealth War
Graves Commission (CWGC)
has unveiled a new memorial at
Brookwood Military Cemetery in
Surrey.
The Brookwood 1914-1918
Memorial is dedicated to the
memory of more than 260 First
World War servicemen who died in
the UK and Ireland, or at sea, but
who have no known grave. Many
of the names are of newly recognised war casualties, whose details were omitted from
official records produced during, and shortly after, the First World War.
These missing names predominantly relate to soldiers and officers who died of their
injuries away from the battlefield.
The cases are presented to the CWGC by families, historians and researchers, but
particularly a group of dedicated volunteers who have formed the In From the Cold Project
(infromthecold.org). Each case is evaluated and forwarded to the relevant government for a
final decision.
Mr Terry Denham, on behalf of the In From the Cold Project, said: ‘When the In From the
Cold Project was set up in 2006, we didn’t appreciate the scale of the task before us, nor did
we envisage our work leading to the creation of a new memorial at Brookwood. The project’s
motto is Sacrifice Remembered and our aim has always been to see these men and women
receive their proper recognition. With the building of the new CWGC Brookwood 1914-1918
Memorial, we feel we have ensured this is the case.’
The memorial has been designed so that new names can be added as additional cases
are accepted.
Centenary funds for restoration
projects still available
G rants of £190,000 have been made
to 21 projects to restore WW1
memorials across Scotland, including
the iconic Kitchener memorial in Orkney
(pictured).
The grants bring to £528,000 the
total amount offered to 67 Scottish
war memorials since the scheme was
launched in 2013. A pot of £1 million
was made available for the centenary,
in order for communities to repair
and restore their own monuments.
Communities can still apply for a share
of the funds.
Frances Moreton, director of War
Memorials Trust, said: ‘The charity is
delighted at the level of interest in this scheme
and the enthusiasm of people across the
country to do something about the condition of
their memorials. There are still plenty of funds
available for the right projects so get in touch
to see if we can help your local war memorial.’
Visit warmemorials.org.
Free records for FT readers
A t Family Tree we’ve
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content for this issue.
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enter the code 003871 .
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Census returns.
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Christmas 2015 Familyitee 7
• Who Do You Think You Are? Live tickets will
be on sale by the end of November at a new-
look whodoyouthinkyouarelive.com.
• Rootsireland.ie has a new look and is now mobile-friendly. Indexed
transcriptions of parish registers now link to the National Library of Ireland’s
unindexed images of parish registers, where a corresponding one is available.
V.-'
V
Historic churches and chapels share
£750,000 heritage funding payout
C hurches listed in the Domesday
Book, the birthplace of King
Richard III and a chapel designed
by Capability Brown are among 14
churches sharing in a £750,000 funding
payout for urgent repairs.
The WREN FCC Heritage Fund Grants
are awarded to historic churches and
chapels on the recommendation of
the National Churches Trust. Since
2010, the National Churches Trust
has safeguarded the future of 54
English churches and chapels by
recommending £2.2 million of
WREN FCC Heritage Fund Grants
to pay for urgent repairs.
A spokesperson for St Mary and
All Saints Church in Fotheringhay,
Northamptonshire (pictured), said that
its grant of £54,500 came ‘just the nick
of time to tackle urgent repairs’ to the
roof, drainage and gutters and external
stonework. King Richard III, recently
reburied in Leicester Cathedral, was
born in the village, and Mary Queen of
Scots was executed there.
For more information about WREN’s
FCC Heritage Fund, or to find out if your
project could be eligible to receive a
grant in 2016, visit www.wren.org.uk.
MyHeritage searches are now records
ntl ■ : I Conjiecl
Collaborate Wlih other ysers
and break down brick warily — logetiher
jityk grilag 9.
M yHeritage.com has unveiled Search
Connect, which enables users to
find others who are looking for the same
ancestors or relatives, and get in touch
with them.
Search Connect includes millions of
searches made by MyHeritage members.
Each search is indexed along with the
full metadata (dates, places, relatives
and more) included in the user’s query.
When another user searches for similar
information, previous searches are
included within the results, along with the
means to get in touch with the users who
conducted them.
Search Connect is complemented
by MyHeritage’s new Global Name
Translation technology, which allows users
to find other people who searched for the
same name in another language.
‘MyHeritage specialises in developing
innovative technologies for family
history discoveries,’ said Gilad Japhet,
founder and CEO of MyHeritage. ‘We are
particularly excited about Search Connect
because it enables users to benefit from
the knowledge of others. When searching
for an elusive ancestor who had left no
trace behind. Search Connect reveals
other people who are searching for the
same person, which is the next best thing.
We anticipate that many of our users will
discover long-lost family members thanks
to this unique addition.’
Viewing Search Connect results is free.
A MyHeritage subscription is required to
contact other users. Users can opt out
and turn off the feature if they do not want
MyHeritage to record their searches.
WW2 civilian gallantry
awards at Ancestry
A ncestry.co.uk has added UK, WWII Civil
Defence Gallantry Awards, 1940-1949.
During the Second World War, up to 1 .9
million men, women, and teens as young
as 1 5 served as Civil Defence Volunteers.
They worked as air raid wardens, first
aid workers, firewatchers, messengers,
in rescue efforts, in rest centres, and
emergency feeding programmes. Acts of
bravery by civilians, police, and fire were
rewarded with a variety of awards and
medals.
Ancestry’s newly added collection
contains digitised copies of evidence
Family'Iiee Christmas 2015
submitted to the Inter-departmental
Committee on Civil Defence Gallantry
Awards and its recommendations to the
Chatfield Committee. The evidence can
include the name and age of the person
being recommended, the date and details of
his or her actions of merit, lists of supporting
documentation and possibly copies, who
made the recommendation (name or title),
tenure, occupation, and the type of award
received or denied.
Also new at Ancestry is Surrey,
Regimental Rolls, 1914-1947. This collection
consists of records from the Queen’s Royal
West Surrey and East Surrey Regiments.
The records for the Queen’s Royal West
Surrey Regiment include Enlistment
Registers and WWII Honours Indexes.
Records for the East Surrey Regiment
include Enlistment Registers, Transfers In
Registers, and Nominal Rolls of Officers.
— w rw i n i .i p j.
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across the globe. Discover the journeys that shaped your family
through our UK Passenger Lists - Incoming and Outgoing, plus
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ancestry.co.uk who will you discover?
Christmas 2015
LOOKING BACK AT 2015
w ww.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
look back at the very best that 2015
had to offer the humble genealogist...
A nother year has passed
in the genealogy world,
with many developments
of interest to those of us
chasing our ancestors. As we head
towards 2016, there is no better time to
take a look back at the last 12 months
to reflect on the latest records releases
online and other developments that
have impacted on how we carry out
our research.
The biggies
With SO many m^or collections
released it is difficult to identify the
most significant, but there are two that
perhaps for me could be described
as ‘game changers’. The first was
gj undeniably the digitisation of the 1939
I National Identity Register for England
I and Wales, released in November by
0 Findmypast (www.findmypast.co.uk)
in partnership with The National
1 Archives (TNA). Thanks to a quirk of
f law - that it was not officially classified
I as a census - it was able to be released
< before the end of the usual 100-year
I closure period. This means a major
f substitute census for the mid-20th
0)
I century has now been made accessible,
0 which is something to be celebrated!
1 Although most of my ancestry is
w Irish and Scottish, I do have some
connections to England in this
period, and have found the database
surprisingly more agile and useable
than I was perhaps expecting it to be.
Ironically, Scotland, which was the
first to make its equivalent records
available online, now has the most
expensive service in the UK (see www.
nrscotland.gov.uk/research/guides/
national-register) - but the good
news for those with Northern Irish
connections is that PRONI (www.
proni.gov.uk) has now catalogued its
1939 books by street name, allowing
the same records to be easily searched
for free via a Freedom of Information
Act request. While I have been told
that the 1939 records for the Isle of
Man have been lost, Findmypast has
informed me that records for the
Channel Islands exist (though, at the
time of writing, I have yet to establish
where!).
The other big record release
was surely the National Fibrary
of Ireland’s new Roman Catholic
registers service at registers. nli.
ie. Almost all but a handful of Irish
parishes now have their records
digitised and made freely available
through the site, but in addition to
actually being able to browse through
the registers, one of the real joys is
the design of the platform itself. Not
only is there an interactive map, but
also ‘waypointed’ records to take you
directly to the type of record and year
within a register. Having previously
accessed many records on microfilm,
this is another of those defining
moments where a serious amount of
pain has been finally removed from
the Irish genealogical experience.
Maps, criminals & soldiers
Many other major releases have,
of course, taken place this year.
TheGenealogist (www.thegenealogist.
co.uk) added a substantial amount
of English and Welsh tithes maps
to its collection, while Findmypast
launched an impressive collection in
June of English and Welsh criminal
records from 1770-1935, as sourced
from various TNA-held Home Office
registers, as well as a substantial
database of British Fibrary-held
English electoral registers in
October. Ancestry (www. ancestry.
co.uk) was equally busy: among its
new offerings was the Register of
Soldier’s Effects from I90I-I929 in
January, as sourced from the National
Army Museum, and in October,
the Scottish-based Calendars of
Confirmations and Inventories from
Christmas 2015 Familyrree 11
1876-1936, the Caledonian equivalent
of its National Probate Calendar
for England and Wales. Forces War
Records (www.forces-war-records.
co.uk) also stepped up its military
releases, with a database of British
and Commonwealth prisoners of
war held in Japan during the Second
World War, and a Military Hospitals
Admissions and Discharge Registers
database from the First World War.
Showstopping successes
In the offline world there have been
equally many developments. One of
the most signihcant was the move
from Fondon to Birmingham of
the annual Who Do You Think You
Are Five? Five show. For me this
was a resounding triumph because,
as a visitor from Scotland, I could
now literally walk off the plane at
Birmingham Airport and step into
the event within hve minutes. This
year’s show was a great event, and I
was delighted to hear that for the next
few years it will continue to be hosted
at the NEC.
Another major event at the start of
the year was the official opening of
the British Fibrary’s new Newspaper
Fibrary at Boston Spa in Yorkshire,
the end of another major move from
the capital. A BBC report at tinyurl.
com/p367934 shows how futuristic
the site is, and why it must surely be
worth a visit! For those unable to do
so, the British Newspaper Archive
(www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
and at Findmypast) continues to place
new material online, and has now
passed 12 million pages. This is almost
a third of the content expected to be
available online upon completion, but
is still a drop in the ocean compared
to what is actually held at Boston Spa.
Legal wrangles
On the legal front, there have been
some interesting developments
this year. For England and Wales,
a proposed change in law at
Westminster is potentially paving the
way for an online service for birth,
marriage and death certihcates,
similar to the online provisions in
Scotland (www.scotlandspeople.gov.
uk) and Northern Ireland (https://
geni.nidirect.gov.uk). While no such
service is currently on the cards, this
will at least remove any barrier to one
being established in the future - a
useful first step.
Speaking of General Register
Offices (GROs), in the Republic of
Ireland, a major upset in 2014 has
been finally rectihed this year. Having
previously launched an online service
containing Irish birth, marriage
and death indexes up to the present
day, without informing the country’s
Information Commissioner - who duly
ordered them to be removed - the
Irish GRO relaunched its service at
www.irishgenealogy.ie in April. The
new version now has closure periods
in place - 50 years for deaths, 75 years
for marriages and 100 for births - and
the Information Commissioner is
happy!
Slightly less delighted, however, are
Scotland’s genealogists, following
news at the end of September that,
for privacy reasons, the Scottish
Courts and Tribunal Service (www.
scotcourts.gov.uk) has now imposed a
100-year closure period on its divorce
records. While the indexes for the
statutory Register of Divorces, kept
from 1984, can still be consulted
at the ScotlandsPeople Centre in
Edinburgh, the register images
12 Famiyriee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Review of the
themselves have been removed, until
the National Records of Scotland
(www.nrscotland.gov.uk) can work
through the legal implications of the
new ruling.
DNA developments
The world of genetic genealogy
continues to grow in popularity, with
new products including Ancestry’s
autosomal DNA testing service at
dna.ancestry.co.uk. The world of
DNA experienced a few somewhat
science-fiction developments this
year as well, however, with news
in February that DNA might be a
viable method by which to store
computer data for up to a million
years (www.sciencedaily.coni/
releases/2015/02/150212154633,
htm), while the advent of three-parent
babies in the UK is also now well and
truly on the horizon (www.bbc.co.uk/
news/health-31069173). Not only
might that redefine how we think of
our families in the future, DNA also
looks like it might soon be causing
some major upsets in the past among
the landed gentry, with challenges
to long-held baronetcies that may
upset those among us with blue blood
(tinyurl.com/ooSaxof).
Fond farewells
Advances in DNA research point
to the future development of the
genealogy industry, but it has also
been a year where the pace of
change has also taken its toll. While
genealogy on television continued
to be served by yet another excellent
series of BBC One’s ‘Who Do You
Think You Are?’ (its 12th), the death
in October of former TV presenter
Gordon Honeycombe, who pioneered
such series in the late 1970s, should
definitely not go unnoticed. An
example of his enjoyable ‘Family
History’ series is available online at
youtu.be/wXhOCSRLdEE.
This was also the year when the
pioneering Origins website (www.
origins.net) hnally went to meet its
maker, its data having been recently
acquired by Findmypast. With the
running of the ScotlandsPeople
website due to be taken over by a new
company from September 2016, it
should be remembered that before it
came onto the scene, it was in fact the
Scots Origins site, which paved the
way. Closer to home, on a personal
level, a local family history society,
Alloway and Southern Ayrshire, was
forced to close earlier this year due
to lack of volunteers. As I write this
I am also reading that a branch of
the Ontario Genealogical Society in
Canada has also just converted itself
into an online-based branch only, for
similar reasons. Let’s hope that the
family history society is not becoming
an endangered species.
A busy year
Finally, for me, it has been an
exceptionally busy and fun year. As
well as producing three more books
on Irish land records, online Irish
genealogy records, and the records of
ancestral crisis in Scotland (available
from www.my-history.co.uk), I also
spoke at genealogy conferences in
Portugal, Toronto and Ottawa, and
more exotically, on board a cruise
ship in July sailing around the
Baltic with Unlock the Past (www.
unlockthepastcruises.com)! Next
year promises to be equally fun, with
conferences in Canada and the USA.
Whatever you are doing for
Christmas, have a good one - and
after the turkey’s been devoured, and
the wine is drunk. I’ll see you on the
other side!
aufnor,
Chris Paton runs the Scotland’s
Greatest Story research service
(www.scotlandsgreateststory. t
co.uk), lectures and teaches ^l|M
online courses through www. HJ||
pharostutors.com. He is the
author of Researching Scottish ILS
Famiiy History, Tracing Your Famiiy
History on the internet, Tracing Your irish
Famiiy History on the internet and The Mount
Stewart Murder, among others, and blogs at
www.britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk.
Christmas 2015 Family free 13
explore the serious, sublime and the ridiculous facets of
family history in this genealogical miscellany. This issue
Tom Wood learns some naval slang and new names.
In this issue.
• A naval occupation
• Baby names
• Baptist records
Baby naming
L ast issue we remarked upon
unusual American baby
names in 2014, and this
time we look at the top 100
first names parents in England and
Wales chose for their children
\ when registering their births
last year. The report, produced
by the Office for National
Statistics, revealed Oliver and
Amelia were still the most
popular first names for baby
boys and girls in 2014 - Amelia
has been at number one since
. 2011 (5,327 girls in 2014), and
* Oliver (6,649 boys) since 2013.
Also in the boys’ top 10 were
Jack, followed by Harry, Jacob,
Charlie, Thomas, George,
Oscar, James and lastly William
(4,134 boys). After Amelia comes
Olivia, Isla, Emily, Poppy, Ava,
Isabella, Jessica, Lily then Sophie
at number 10 (2,905 girls).
No real surprises there, until we
get to some of the newcomers to the
top 100: new entries for boys include
Ellis at 94, Joey at 97 and Jackson at
100, while other big movers upwards
are Kian, Teddy, Theodore, Elijah,
Albert and Ereddie. Not quite so
popular as in previous years were
Jamie, Ryan, Riley, Kai, Connor,
Bobby and Einlay. Eor baby girls, new
entries were Thea at 79, Darcie at
80, Lottie at 84, Harper at 89, Nancy
at 90 and Robyn at 100, replacing
Niamh, Paige, Skye, Tilly, Isobel and
Maddison/Madison.
The report also features an
interesting breakdown of names by
region, covering the North East,
North West, Yorkshire and The
Humber, East Midlands, West
Midlands, East, London, South
trends
East, South West and Wales. Jack was
the most popular boy’s name in the
North East, bucking the trend of
Oliver elsewhere, with the exception
of London, where Muhammad topped
the list. Amelia reigned supreme
everywhere for girls, except for the
South West, where Olivia was the
main choice.
Einally, the report mentions some
of the trendier names of 2014, with
cultural influences such as pop
music (for example, the band One
Direction) and the ‘Game of Thrones’
series making their mark. These
include Khaleesi, Daenerys, Arya,
Sansa and Brienne for girls, and
Lannisters, Greyjoys, Starks, Niall,
Zayn and Logan for boys. Whatever
happened to simple names like Tom?
At least they’d be easier to spell when
the little mites begin school!
Doing the donkey work
Once more a plea for help has
borne fruit, many times over! Back
in September I wondered about the
occupation of ‘donkeyman’ - and I
think the postman must have thought
I’d won the pools from the amount
of mail I got! Seriously, though, many
thanks to everyone who got in touch
to tell me that a ‘donkeyman’ was a
naval term. Indeed, it seems it was a
full-time occupation on seagoing ships
and for those, like me, who hadn’t
come across it before. I’ll hand you
over to Richard Dawson for his great
explanation: ‘The donkeyman is the
senior rating in the engine room of
a British registered ship; so called for
his attendance on the donkey boiler.
How do you want to contact Tom?
By post ‘Dear Tom’, Family Tree,
61 Great Whyte, Ramsey, Huntingdon PE26 1HJ
By email editorial@family-tree.co.uk with ‘Dear Tom’ in the subject
line, and we will forward your correspondence.
14 Familyrree Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
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which was fired up to provide steam
for the cargo winches, pumps and
generators when the ship came into
port and the main boilers were shut
down. The boiler name is analogous
to the donkey on a farm, which is a
smaller version, of the main power
units (horses). In port the donkeyman
was foreman, while the firemen
(stokers), trimmers (who harrowed
coal from the bunkers to the hremen)
and greasers were on day work. At
sea on ships with three engineers he
might take the 8 to 12 watch, while the
chief engineer was awake, but relaxing
in his room. The boiler has gone but
the man still exists.’
Peter Flintham tells me he was an
engineer in the Merchant Navy for
40 years, and the donkeyman used
to look after the auxiliary engines
(cleaning, oiling, greasing) as well as
the steering gear greasing. On steam
ships he would also be responsible
for the donkey - or package - boilers,
but the main boilers would be the
fireman’s job.
Mike Davey points out donkeyman
is an example of ‘Jack Speak’, or Naval
slang. Rumour has it, says Mike, that
the name donkeyman has its origins
in the fact some sailing ships, once in
port, did actually use donkeys walking
a treadmill as a source of power to
drive winches. In Jack Speak, ‘donkey
work’ is used to describe any heavy
manual task. Donkey boilers were in
regular use in Devonport Dockyard
as recently as the 1990s, when steam-
powered warships were moored
alongside. They looked like ancient
traction engines without the driver’s
cab, and were unable to propel
themselves so were dragged alongside
the ship by any tractor-like vehicle
available. Thus it seemed strange to
see a nuclear-powered submarine with
a donkey boiler alongside! Mike adds
that ‘donkey’ appears a few times in
Jack Speak - a donkey walloper is a
cavalry officer and a tailor’s donkey is
a sewing machine.
My sincere thanks go to everyone
who got in touch about this topic.
Four weddings
My appeal to hear about people
who got married more than twice
inspired Brian Howes, from Ferryside
in Carmarthenshire, to get in touch
about a four times-wed Stanley Henry
George Harrod (1912-2001), who
while not a direct relative, appears on
one of his more recent family trees. So
we’re off to a hne start.
Brian tells me Stanley spent
his whole life in Great Yarmouth,
Norfolk, and it was there each of
his four marriages apparently took
place. Wedding number one was to
Gwendoline May Guymer (born 1919)
in 1939 and they had three children
before she died in 1963. Stanley then
married Doreen Herbert (born 1922)
in 1967 and for both of them it was
their second marriage. Sadly, it was
also short-lived because Doreen died
in 1970, and later that same year
Stanley married for the third time.
This wife was Frances Lilian Rooms
(born 1900) and it was her second
marriage, which lasted just seven years
until 1977, when Frances died. A year
later, in 1978, Stanley married for the
fourth time, to Joyce Maystone (born
1916). It was Joyce’s third marriage
and it lasted until she died in 1995.
It must be pretty unusual for an
ordinary person to marry four times,
especially in the same town, so it will
take some beating. My thanks to Brian
for passing on these details. I am still
interested to hear about other multi-
married men and women.
Relationship puzzle
Still vaguely with matrimony, here is
a puzzle that Jack R Richards, from
Codicote near Hitchin, is hoping
someone will answer. He wonders,
‘What relation is a woman to the
children of her divorced husband’s
second marriage?’, and suggests it
might be a ‘pre-stepmother’. I doubt
there is any named relationship at all
but, if you can name one, then drop
me a hne.
Unlucky 19
Now is 19 an unlucky number? For
two of my regular readers’ families,
it certainly was. First up is Stephen
Taylor who tells me the largest family
among his ancestors seems to be that
of Frederick Penwill, who married
Hannah Jake tta Vavasor in Plymouth
in 1889, when she was 18. By the
time of the 1911 Census, 22 years
later, this couple had apparently
had 19 children, of whom only eight
were still alive, and just hve living
with their parents in two rooms in
Plymouth. Nineteen seems to have
been a wretchedly unlucky number of
children for them. I cannot begin to
imagine the misery they endured.
But they weren’t alone, as Brian
Holden has a similar tale to tell about
a great-grandmother’s family. She
was Harriet Turner, born in February
1843 in Wharf Court in Reading. She
appears on the 1861 Census, living
with a George Long, born in January
1842 at Rushy Platt in Swindon. The
couple married in Reading on 20 May
1861 but it was not a tremendously
long marriage, as Harriet died giving
birth to a stillborn child on 22 June
1880. However, in those 19 years of
marriage, Harriet gave birth 19 times,
all of which were single births. Of
the 19 children, hve were stillborn,
six died during their hrst month of
life, three passed away before their
hrst birthdays and just hve lived into
adulthood. Details of the births were
in a list handed down from Brian’s
grandmother, presumably copied
from the family Bible. Brian adds:
‘Aside from the dreadful sadness in
this young couple’s lives, Harriet was
pregnant for about 19 of her 37 years
of life... Her husband George never
remarried and lived out his old age
with his daughter Alice Maud.’ So 19
was a terribly unlucky number for this
couple too. Do let me know of other
similarly unfortunate large families.
Cotton’s gravestone
I’m always pleased to hear about
very old headstones in churchyards
and Amanda West has come across a
beauty found in St Mary’s in Sunbury-
on-Thames. It dates back to 1676
and its inscription reads: ‘Here lyeth
interred ye body of Nicholas Cotton,
Gent, who departed this life 3rd
November Anno Dom 1676 in y 54th
yeare of his age. Natures due debt
Death he has Paid. Free Grace in
Christ his soul has savd.’
Sadly, Amanda tells me, nothing
is known of Nicholas Cotton, or
his family, other than his rank as a
16 Familyrree Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
^1^^” ‘ 4 *-*- ^ iCio/^ r* V * •
s\«
-a.4-
1
The 1676 burial register entry for Nicholas Cotton, and the inscription on his headstone.
gentleman and that he was sufficiently
wealthy to warrant a grand memorial
in a small churchyard. We hope
Nicholas may ring a bell somewhere
and that someone will be able to
supply more information about
him. It’s certainly one of the oldest
memorials I have heard about.
Tracing Baptists
Those of US whose ancestors mostly
appear in Church of England baptism
registers should be grateful they
were not Baptists, as I understand
members of the congregation went
largely unbaptised - thus unrecorded
- until they were adults. However,
I was pleased to learn from Helen
Claus, whose family became Baptists
in 1800, that some Baptists and other
Independent Christians may have
thanksgiving or dedication services
for babies, although no water is
involved. Helen also tells me some
Baptist churches and chapels kept lists
of births of children born to church
members, but there was no obligation
I to do this, so tracing birth dates can
I be difficult. In a Baptist Church,
I Helen reminds us, adults are baptised
I as a sign of their personal faith, and
I this can happen at any age.
I As if to prove this point, Raymond
I Golds has been in touch to remind
I me this subject cropped up back in
the September issue of Family Tree in
I 2010, when he offered a baptism of a
0 Christopher Leach at Rickmansworth,
1 in Hertfordshire, when in his 91st year.
I My word, he’s got a better memory
@ than I have! And 91 years will still take
I some beating.
I The last word on this comes from
I Helen, who points out that if a Baptist
^ chapel is closed, the registers may be
lodged with the local record office or
with Baptist society archives.
Illegitimacy the norm
I’m winding up with an unusual
story about a family that Georgina
Hutber discovered while researching
her ancestors, who seemed to thrive
on illegitimacy! Her maternal
grandfather’s family were Tomases
from the Staffordshire Moorlands,
where as she says, illegitimate children
seemed to be quite typical. She
explains: ‘Richard Lomas married
Hannah Berisford in 1804 and they
had 13 children (12 boys and one girl)
between 1804 and 1828. The only girl,
Hannah, was born in 1810, and went
on to have eight illegitimate children.
They were Mary (1832), William
(1833), Hannah (1837), Margaret
(1838), twins Betty and Liddy (1841),
Isaac (1844) and Emma (1847). They
were baptised in Sheen and Longnor,
and the parish registers clearly
show that Hannah was unmarried,
except in the case of Emma, who was
baptised as the daughter of William
and Hannah Lomas. However, it
seems this child was also illegitimate
- the vicar of Longnor obviously knew
what was going on and hlled in the
register accordingly! In addition, the
birth of Margaret was registered by
one William Lomas, resident at the
same address as Hannah.
‘The William Lomas, in question,
was born about 1790, several years
after the death of his “father” George
Lomas! He married Lanny Ball in
1832, but she died in 1834, aged only
22, after the birth, of her second child,
both of whom died in early infancy. By
the 1841 Census, Hannah Lomas was
living at the same address as William,
with their hrst six children. William
died in 1849, aged 62, and Hannah in
1860, aged 50.’
However the real nugget here,
Georgina tells us, is that ‘William, was
almost certainly Hannah’s uncle!’. So
how did an uncle and niece get away
with producing so many illegitimate
children? We’ll never know. But if
you do want to know more about
illegitimacy in the Staffordshire
Moorlands, Georgina recommends
reading Incidences and Attitudes: A
view of bastardy from eighteenth century
rural North Staffordshire cl 758-1820 by
Patricia Bromfield {Midland History,
vol 27, issue 1, 2002, pp80-98).
Christmas wishes
Now I must most sincerely thank
everyone who has so very kindly
written to me via the magazine
this year. Without your wonderfully
informative correspondence this
column would cease to exist. So do
please keep your letters coming in the
New Year.
It can take more than a matter of
weeks to get the details from your
correspondence into print, so I must
ask for your patience on this score.
Linally, it just remains for me to
wish everyone a wonderfully happy
Christmas and the very best of good
fortune and luck in 2016.
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 FamilyTree 17
Mr ^
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a single website or the
entire internet, hunting
widely for your ancestors
often achieves specific
- and very surprising -
results, as David Annal’s
discoveries can vouch.
B efore the days of online
research, there was only
one way to approach a
family history brickwall.
You used to have to plan a trip to
a record office to search through
a specific document or, as Audrey
Collins (my former colleague at
The National Archives, TNA) likes ]
to put it, ‘go to a place to look at aj
thing!’.
This is still a perfectly valid
approach to problem solving,
or indeed to any sort of family
history research. You establish
that a document or a series
of documents is held by a
particular record office and
you search it, hoping to find
references to your ancestors. ,
Of course, increasingly,
your search will take place
online and it’s more a case
of identifying which of
the various family history
websites provides access to
the documents that you’re
interested in. But the
principle is the same; it’s a
focused approach to research
and one that frequently
yields positive results.
The broad-brush
approach ■
We talked last issue (FT
December) about using
the ‘less is more’ principle]
to improve the prospects
of tracking down your
more elusive ancestors.
With sites such as Ancestry.co.uk,1
Findmypast.co.uk and
18 Famiyitee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Search the web widely
Benefits of the
broad-brush
approach
* — ^
TheGenealogist.co.uk offering blanket
searches of all their resources, you
can use the same principle to find
records of your ancestors in the most
unexpected places.
V The likelihood of turning up
K relevant hits depends to some degr
on how common the name is that
you’re looking for but it’s definitely
a strategy that’s worth considering.
Many years ago, while searching for
information about a distant relative of
mine, I turned up something wholly
unexpected.
William Annal was born in
Gravesend in 1823, the son of an
Orcadian sailor. William is absent
from most of the 19th-century
censuses (he was somewhere out on '
the high seas, far from the prying
eyes of the census officials) but from
the returns for his family, we can tell
that he lived most of his life (while
on shore) in Greenwich, where ]
eventually died in 1905.
He spent more than 40 years of his
life as a merchant seaman and would
undoubtedly have had some colourful
tales to tell about his experiences in
distant parts of the globe. With a bit
of effort we could reconstruct some
of his voyages (as least as far as the
, dates and destinations are concerned)
: and we could piece together a fairly
^comprehensive story of his life.
But thanks to a general search (
^Ancestry I now know that William
'had a rather surprising interlude ii
his life. In late 1863, at the height of
the American Civil War, he found
himself in Boston and on 1 December
1863, he enlisted in the Massachusetts
56th Infantry Regiment. His service
was rather short-lived; he deserted
from the regiment on 28 January
1864 without seeing active service and
quickly returned to his life at sea.
While this is clearly not a case of
problem solving, it serves to illustrate '
the point that you just don’t know
where you ancestors are going to turn ^
up and that these broad searches of
the major family history databases
are well worth a try. Remember as
well, that the websites are constantly
adding new material so if you haven’t
carried out this sort of search for a few ]
months, it’s worth trying again now.
How to search Discovery]
And it doesn’t just apply to the
major commercial databases. TNA’s
Discovery catalogue (discovery.
nationalarchives.gov.uk) provides 1
another excellent example of the
benefits of this ‘scattergun’ approach]
to research. Discovery now includes
descriptions of a staggering 32 million"’
records, over 9 million of which can bej
downloaded as digital images.
Of course it’s names that drive"'
" our research and we have to develop]
an understanding of how The
National Archives’ catalogue wa^
compiled. Discovery is the result of J
years of cataloguing and indexing j
by TNA staff and volunteers. Muckj
of it consists of descriptions of
documents; effectively, the old papeij
lists compiled by TNA in its Public
Record Office days and later keyed I
into PRO CAT, the original version/
of Discovery. You wouldn’t expect
these descriptions to include names,!
other than where the hie relates to a '
specihc individual. Of little use to us
as family historians are those series ofj
documents that are described by the j
range of names that the individual ^
volumes include. Unless your ancestor
happens to be the hrst or last in the
volume you’re not going to pick them]
up. You’re more likely to have succes^
with these records using a morej
traditional, focused search.
You also need to understand that!
' the Discovery search engine doesn’^
: work like those operated by the
main commercial sites. Even using]
the Advanced search’ you have a
I very limited number of options: you]
^ can search for individual words or |
i an ‘exact word or phrase’. If you’re]
searching for a name you need to
bear in mind that they can appear'^
in a number of different formats, fori
^example:
I John Smith^
I Smith, Johrj
I Smith, J
' Dates of birth (if you know them)]
'can be a very powerful tool for thisj
sort of search but again, they mayj
appear in a number of different
Christmas 2015 Family free 19
PROBLEM SOLVING FOR FAMILY HISTORIANS
Search
solutions:
' part 3
formats, depending on
how the original list was
compiled. If you search
for ‘25 August 1927’
and the document lists
your ancestor’s date of
birth as 25/08/1927
your search will be
unsuccessful.
Nevertheless, despite
these provisos. Discovery
is an enormously useful
problem-solving tool.
In addition to the
holdings of TNA itself.
Discovery also provides
access to descriptions
of records held by more than 2,500
archives around the UK. As a tool for
the ‘scattergun’ approach to problem
solving. Discovery knows no rivals.
Working with Google
Or perhaps it does; in many ways our
ultimate weapon is our old friend
Google (or for that matter, your major
search engine of choice). Offering
the simplest and easiest to use search
function, a search engine is the nearest
thing we have to an index to the
internet. And since genealogy is one of
the internet’s most popular pursuits,
it enables us to search millions of
websites in one go. Controlling your
Case Study #1
Mary Bushby married Samuel Tuffen (or
Tuffin) on 15 March 1825 at the parish
church of St Mary, Islington. Fortunately
(for our purposes) Samuel died in
1846 and Mary remarried. This second
marriage, taking place after 1837, gives
her father’s name: Richard Bushby, a
soldier.
The Army service record of a Richard
Bushby who was born around 1774 in
Little Brickhill, Buckinghamshire and
served in the First Regiment of Foot
Guards (the Grenadier Guards) for 21
years before being discharged in 1814,
seemed like a good fit but there was
nothing to provide definitive proof that
this was our Richard. Crucially, there was
no sign of a record of death or burial for
him.
A bit of digging at The National
Archives turned up some Army pension
records, which provided a vital clue.
References were found to Richard
receiving his pension in Barbados
between 1825 and 1831.
And this is where a broad search
of The National Archives Discovery
catalogue paid dividends. Entering
‘Richard Bushby’ ‘Barbados’ in
the search box returned two highly
promising documents from the Colonial
Office dating from 1825 and 1826.
CO 28/98/38, dating from 1 5
December 1826, has the following
description: confirms that Mr Richard
Bushby, reporter of vessels, will in future
remit £50 per quarter to his family in
England.
While for CO 28/99, also dating from
V
1826, we have: Robert Oldershaw, clerk
to the Trustees, Islington (enquiring about
Richard Bushby, believed to be employed
in Barbados, whose wife and children are
receiving parish relief).
The reference to Islington seemed to
suggest that we might be on the right
tracks as far as a link to the
Mary who married there in
1 825 was concerned and
both appeared to be of
interest. The documents
themselves proved to be
conclusive regarding the link
and also were packed full of
the sort of human interest
that you rarely get from
records held by Government
departments.
The files comprise
a number of separate
documents: firstly the letter
referred to in the above
abstract from the Islington
Poor Law authorities but
also, a letter from Richard
himself (dated, Barbados
20 April 1826) addressed to
‘My Dear Wife...’ in which he
refers to his appointment to ‘a comfortable
situation at Barbados’ as ‘Reporter of
Vessels’ which he says is ‘as good as £200
a year’. Richard goes on to say that ‘it will
be in my power to send you £80 a year’ and
then turns to more personal family matters:
/ Rec’d your letter giving me the unpleasant
♦tiA *
i'A.l
1 liEKn irt U- oBrtili, ^
Richard Bushby’s discharge
certificate gave promising
clues as to his identity,
but further sources were
needed to establish that
David really had identified
the right man.
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20 Familyriee Christmas 2015
Search the web widely
6^ o !
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I ‘
^ V o i
£= A I
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1=1^
W O Q W
III?
C > o o
o 0) o o
search is perhaps the
biggest challenge
you’ll face. Getting
lots of hits is usually
quite easy; the skill
is in using exactly
the right words
to deliver relevant
results.
You’d be surprised
how often a simple
combination of your
ancestor’s surname and the
parish that they were associated with
can turn up trumps. Again, it helps
if the name isn’t that common and
the place is quite small - my own
brickwall with a
family called Port
who came from
London provides
a particularly
tough challenge!
However, a few
additional words to
restrict the number
of hits can often do
the trick. And don’t
forget the power of putting
a word or series of words in
inverted commas. ‘John Smith’ is a
far more powerful search term than
John Smith - although I wouldn’t
personally recommend trying either!
In some respects, this approach
to research isn’t all that new. In the
old days, record offices and libraries
weren’t complete without a wall taken
up with wooden filing cabinets, their
drawers full of index cards containing
references to names found in specihc
documents. They may not have been
quite as sophisticated or as effective as
an online catalogue but they did the
same job, and every family historian
of a certain vintage will be able to
tell you about the index card that
helped them to get around their own
brickwall.
Now that the job’s so much easier;
what are you waiting for? ^
News of the Dear Little Stranger, being no more there
is no doubt, god bless her, that she is happy, I should a
liked to had the pleasure of seeing the Little Angel before
it pleased God to take her, and also Marys being Married
I hope she as bettered herself. . .
The last sentence undoubtedly refers to Mary’s
marriage to Samuel Tuffin, which had taken place in
1825, and proves beyond doubt that this is indeed the
right Richard Bushby.
.3 ~
David found vital clues in TNA’s Army pension records
mentioning Richard receiving a pension in Barbados
between 1 825 and 1 831 . These made it clear he was
the man David was searching for.
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t
*
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diy
In this instance, records held in the Colonial Office
collections at TNA surprisingly included personal family
letters, between husband and wife.
www.family-tree.co.uk
Christmas 2015 Famiyotee 21
PROBLEM SOLVING FOR FAMILY HISTORIANS
Search
solutions:
' part 3
If Case Study #2
Thomas Annal (or Annall) is the ancestor of a large group of Annals
who lived in Yorkshire from the middle of the 18th century. The earliest
sighting of the family in Yorkshire is the marriage of Thomas to Isabel
Bridgwater on 12 November 1741 in the North Riding parish of Well.
The entry in the parish registers refers to the groom as Thomas Annal
from North Brittain’ - a term used (in an attempt to squash nationalist
feelings) to refer to Scotland.
This wasn’t a great surprise as both branches of the family are
Scottish (one from Fife, my own from Orkney) and a search of the
relevant records quickly turned up a suitable candidate: the baptism
of a Thomas Annall in the Fife parish of Anstruther Easter in 1 71 5, the
son of Thomas and Elisabeth Annall. There was nothing to say that
this couldn’t be our Thomas but equally nothing to say that it definitely
was.
This therefore remained no more than a theory for several years
until one day I tried a Google search: Thomas Annall’ ‘Well’. One of
the first hits I came up with referred me to a collection of Sheriff Court
Deeds, which had been indexed by the Fife Family History Society.
The documents are held by the National Records of Scotland and the
relevant deed contains the following words:
‘It is Contracted Agreed and Ended Betwixt the Partys following: Vizt.
Thomas Annall Shoemaker in Well in the County of York only lawfull Son
and Heir now on life to the deceast Thomas Annall Shoemaker in Easter
Anstruther. . . ’
Absolute proof that the Thomas who settled in Yorkshire was the
son of the man from Easter Anstruther.
Simply searching Google, David stumbled on some invaluable
indexes that led him to a Sheriff Court Deed held by the National
Records of Scotland, which proved that he had identified his
ancestor Thomas correctly. For further information about Sheriff
Court deeds see the online guide at www.nrscotland.gov.uk/
research/guides/sheriff-court-records.
oaX ^
- —I — — - -
n
g^/Ca/ a ft ^ .‘ 56 ^“’-''^
For years David Annal’s earliest
proven sighting of his Annal
ancestors was the 1 741 entry
showing the marriage of Thomas
Annal to Isabel Bridgwater.
J
Xiffout tfye author^
David Annal has been involved
in the family history world for
more than 30 years and is a
former principal family history
specialist at The National
Archives. He is an experienced
lecturer and the author of a
number of best-selling family
history books, including Easy
Family History and (with Peter Christian)
Census: The Famiiy Historian’s Guide. David
now runs his own family history research
business, Lifelines Research.
V J
22 Family’itee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
QUITE A CENSUS SUBSTITUTE
Ancestors in England & Wales on the eve of war
Searching the
1939 Register
With the digitisation of the 1939 Register for England and Wales by Findmypast,
in association with The National Archives, we can now search online for our
ancestors at the start of World War II. Learn about their lives at this crucial point in
history and see how to get the most from your searches with Helen Tovey.
E vacuees, rationing, air raids
and blitzed cities are just some
of the key images that come to
mind when we think of Britain
in the Second World War - and it was to
prepare for these wartime eventualities
that the 1939 Register was originally taken.
Recording each person in the UK and
Northern Ireland, this massive bureaucratic
JL.
www.family-tree.co.uk
undertaking aimed to ensure that the
population was identified, fed, housed
safely and mobilised. It is the records of 28
million of the 41 million people living in
England and Wales at the time that we can
currently search at online Findmypast or at
The National Archives (TNA), Kew.
The National Registration Act was ^
passed as an emergency measure on 5 ^
Ojust one of the 1 .2 million
scanned full colour 1939 Register
pages for England and Wales.
As with a census enumerator’s
summary book, on the register you
can see your ancestors’ neighbours.
This page includes the inhabitants
of 61 Great Whyte, Ramsey - now
home of Family Tree!
©Details listed are: address, name,
date of birth, gender, marital status,
occupation, changes of name,
whether a person was a member of
the Armed Forces or reserves, with
appointments such as ARP warden
included. People who already were
serving in the Armed Forces are not
included in the register.
©The 1939 Register was a ‘living’
document, used by the NHS up
until the early 1990s - so changes
of name are often recorded. Babies
born after the 1 939 Register was
taken were added to subsequent
register books as identity cards
continued to be issued until 1952. If
you were born prior to 1952 your ID
card number would have also been
your NHS number.
Oas the register was updated until
1 991 , then the details of those who
died prior to that, but who were
born within the past 1 00 years,
are usually visible. Anyone born
more than a century ago will also
have their details published. If your
ancestor was born within the last
1 00 years but died after 1 991 then
their details will usually be currently
blanked out.
Christmas 2015 Familyrree 23
Mr
QUITE A CENSUS SUBSTITUTE
Foster Household
9 Dalton-in
rijrfit'r.r. 1
Engtand
FIRST MAMEjS]
LASrf4AME{S)
BIRTH YEAH
footer
^ MjfV A Foster and 1 more person are on this tecord
!• UpKl^te the nKord
Besides finding ancestors, the register can help you to
discover who lived, or was staying in, your house in 1939.
In addition, if you know the address that your ancestor
was living at, the address search can provide useful
information to help you pinpoint your ancestors from
among the search results listings.
findmypast*: « hvm
Hf-ORtiR TRAirSCnFTKW |PRf WVW|i
Riddv Househoid
Sf 9 . ... .
2 'fflirt iwidfahd )mnr4 WbmwA
September 1939 - two days after
the outbreak of war. During the
week ending Friday 29 September
1939 the enumerators handed out
the registration forms, then by
Monday 2 October everyone had
been issued with an identity card
and the enumerators had compiled
the household schedules into their
im H
•h Ifffl i OMfiy
N«tH>ful A
fi Unlock the full Riddy household
Th» mw cofTppnlMAiM rccofid i*t ew retcjiKd, ofilr enfaw
AMildble' in 1, & cr IS h«ts«liDM bundles
For instance, these are the details
(left) obtained at the preview stage of
a person search.
However, if you search by address,
then click through to preview, you
then reach the same preview screen,
and can so cross- refer the address
(above) and your ancestor’s name.
register books. These record the
name, address and occupation for
each person - and their date of birth
(invaluable for locating someone with
a common name).
If your ancestor was born within the
last 100 years but
details will be currently blanked out.
As time passes, the details of further
ancestors will become available to view,
once 100 years and a day have passed
since their date of birth. If you have
proof of death (eg a death certiheate)
died after 1991
then their
Left: You can
search the
database by
The National
Archives
piece number.
find my past) #
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uii RfQitTii TumninioN fmmrao
Eastwood Household
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The piece numbers had also been displayed on preview results, allowing you
to cross-refer details, and so help ensure you spent your credits that bit more
accurately. However, at the time of going to print they were no longer displayed
at the preview results stage.
24 Family’Itee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Ancestors in England & Wales on the eve of war
1939 Register credits
• 60 credits cost £6.95 (1 household
costs 60 credits);
• 300 credits £24.95 (£4.99 per
household);
• 900 credits £54.95 (£3.66 per
household).
Credits are valid for 90 days.
Subscribers to Findmypast are eligible
for a 25 per cent discount on a
300-credit bundle.
In addition to the household transcription and image of the original register page on
payment of your 60 credits, you can also access newspaper coverage, vintage photographs from the Trinity Mirror collection and
maps dating from the turn of the last century, mid-20th-century and the present-day. Unlocking a household also provides access
to demographic information covering household sizes, common occupations and more.
and would like to request that a record
be made public sooner, this is possible.
Findmypast subscribers contact the
website; non-subscribers need to apply
via The National Archives under the
Freedom of Information Act and pay a
£25 fee. It is also possible to view your
own registration details - applications
can be made using the form found
at discovery.nationalarchives . gov.uk/
PaidSearch/DSA1939Register and on
payment of a £10 fee.
To search the register go to
Findmypast.co.uk (free to search,
with pay-per-view credits to view
transcriptions and images), or visit
The National Archives where the
digitised collection is free to use.
While the news that the 1939 Register
database was not to be included as
part of the Findmypast subscription
has been met with disappointment,
the details in the 1939 Register do
provide a new research avenue online,
particularly as it will be another six
or seven years before we will be able
to access the next available census
(the 1921 for England, Wales and
Scotland) . It is thanks to the efforts
of Guy Etchells and Steven Smyrl
(www.cigo.ie) in their Freedom of
Information campaign to enable
public access to the 1939 Register, that
we are able to view these records at all.
To see how you can use the register
to complement your research, turn to
page 26. We would be very interested
to hear about your searches of the
1939 Register. Please email Helen. t@
family-tree.co.uk.
Find the notes
by the Registrars
General on
National
Registration on
the histpop.org
website at (tinyurl.
com/obmoky3).
The House of
Commons had
agreed the
preparation of the
register by the end
of 1938 and 65,000
enumerators
were recruited to
enable speedy
registration (49,000
enumerators had
been used for the
1931 Census).
www.family-tree.co.uk
Christmas 2015 Familyrree 25
^ 20TH-CENTURY RESEARCH ADVENTURE
Register:
[Ve found my
ii?tKg^l939
Irao now?
ancestors
W
Following the online
launch of the 1939
Register, Emma Jolly
explains how to make the
most of your discoveries
by using them as a
starting point for further
research into the iives of
your mid-20th century
ancestors.
#
Within weeks of the start of World War
II, the Government had undertaken the
1 939 Register - in anticipation of the
conflict and chaos that was to ensue.
26 Family'riee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Images: London photos, St Paul’s Cathedral 1940, London street 1941 © Everett Historical/
Shutterstock; rationing by Raz67, published under the Creative Commons licence.
Getting to grips with a new resource
1 939 Register
showing the
Spencer family
- Emma’s
great-
grandparents
and 2x great-
grandmother -
at 1 51 Dynevor
Road, Stoke
Newington,
London N16.
L ike many people, I was
eager to explore the English
and Welsh 1939 Register
on Findmypast.co.uk on
its official launch day. As we have
already seen on pages 23-25, the
facts revealed in the register include
names, addresses, dates of birth,
marital status, occupations, and
civilian war roles as of Friday 29
September 1939. Within all of this
information are clues that can provide
invaluable details about the relative
being researched. Findmypast.co.uk
offers some useful follow-up material,
too, including interactive historical
maps of the area, local contemporary
photographs and a ‘Fife in 1939’
feature.
more detailed maps at the relevant
local record office or on the National
Fibrary of Scotland’s Map website,
maps.nls.uk. Contrasting a pre-war
with a post-war map can indicate some
of the changes that took place in the
area, particularly as a consequence of
bombing air raids.
If you have found family living
in Fondon, check the Bombsight
website to see whether their address
or neighbouring properties were hit
during the Blitz of 7 October 1940 to
One of the maps on
Findmypast showing
1 51 Dynevor in the
Stoke Newington area.
6 June 194L My great-grandparents’
home in Dynevor Road no longer
exists but using the contemporary
map provided by Findmypast,
I can compare the streets with
those mapped on Bombsight www.
bombsight.org/ explore/ greater-
london/hackney/stoke-newington-
central. Focal and national
newspapers did not always detail air
raids for reasons of propaganda and
maintaining morale. Nevertheless,
they are always worth searching with
the names of streets, family members
or neighbours that you have found in
the 1939 Register.
Investigating an institution
Not everyone was at home on
registration night. If your relative was
in an institution such as an asylum,
workhouse, prison or hospital,
you should hnd their full details
in the register, however. Using the
address of the institution, you can
check with the local archive. The
National Archives (TNA) or on
Hosprec www.nationalarchives.gov.
uk/hospitalrecords, or search The
Workhouse workhouses.org.uk and
Children’s Homes websites www.
childrenshomes.org.uk for further
details and to help locate more
detailed records.
Cross-referring your details
You can also use the address to
correlate with residence details on the
English and Welsh Probate Calendar
(indexed on Ancestry) to hnd dates of
death. The address could also help to
pinpoint a county or region of death,
which is useful for identifying death
certihcates and likely places of burial
(search DeceasedOnline.com for
WHEflE THfir IN 11-lE
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ltd. M m *|i| h"t.iiiii C>wtnp
Exploring the neighbourhood
Focal maps dating from 1939, or
just before, have a number of uses,
such as helping to locate an address
of interest, besides giving an insight
into the locality at the time. They
also deepen our understanding of a
relative’s immediate surroundings.
To take your research further, hnd
Christmas 2015 Family-rree 27
Mr
20TH-CENTURY RESEARCH ADVENTURE
T
cemetery or cremation records).
Comparing details with electoral
registers (recently released on
Findmypast, but also available
elsewhere, see F'T December) can
help to identify how long a family was
resident at a given address.
Married names
One of the genealogical gems on the
register is that of married names which
have been added after registration
night in 1939. As the records remained
with the NHS up until 1991, changes
of names between 1939 and 1991 are
included.
The 1939 Register entry for the
author Enid Blyton shows that, in
1939, she was still married to her first
husband, Hugh Pollock. She would
divorce Pollock and marry Kenneth
Darrell Waters in 1943. Here the
index shows ‘Enid M Waters’, her
later married name, with ‘Pollock’ in
brackets. As Enid was already married
in 1939, her maiden name does not
feature. Using both surnames given
in the index should enable you to find
a marriage in the relevant General
Register Office (GRO) marriage
indexes.
Working lives
Although the occupation column
should be straightforward, there
are questions over the accuracy of
information given. One question
arises over the commonly-used phrase,
‘unpaid domestic duties’. It is worth
checking with any living relatives
Preview (below) of the 1 939 index entry
for author Enid Blyton under the surname
Pollock, that of her first husband.
whether the person concerned did
indeed undertake no paid work.
Women’s occupations are commonly
excluded from formal records of
the 19th and early 20th centuries,
particularly those of married women,
but this does not mean they only
worked at home.
Date of birth
Unlike the censuses, the register
requested a date of birth rather
than an age. As some individuals
were confused by this and others
deliberately gave a false date, it is
sensible to approach this date with
caution and try to confirm with
another record - ideally a birth
certihcate. Where you have established
that dates of birth are correct, you can
use them to check for deaths in the
GRO indexes from 1 April 1969. Other
searches using dates of birth can be
made of school registers on Ancestry
and Findmypast. They can also be used
to identify a likely quarter for birth
registration or to locate a potential
baptism record for those with common
names.
Blanked records
Of the 41 million records available,
approximately 13 million are currently
closed. However, some of these can
be opened. One of my great-uncles
died in 1942, but seemingly his death
f* 0
30,
iTni kHt nawEH
U
tlwfl
Bkrtcn
was not reported, and his register
record is redacted. In such cases, any
Findmypast 12-month subscribers
(World and Britain) can complete a
form to request an officially closed
record to be opened. For those who
aren’t 12-month subscribers, this
process costs £25, and must be made
via the Freedom of Information form
at disco very.nationalarchives . gov.uk/
PaidSearch/FOIl 939Register.
If you or a relative were alive at the
time of the register but are under
100 years old and want to see your
details, the information can be
requested via a subject access request,
which is detailed online at ico.org.
uk/for-organisations/guide-to-
data-protection/principle-6-rights/
subject-access-request.
War service
Any individual serving on 29
September 1939 in the Royal Navy,
Regular Army, Royal Air Force, Royal
Marines, or any of the women’s
services administered by the Royal
Navy, Army or Royal Air Force was
absent from the register. If you know
a family member was serving in the
armed forces and you have a copy of
their death certihcate, you can request
their service record from the Ministry
of Defence: www.gov.uk/guidance/
requests-for-personal-data-and-service-
records.
c- ■
I 5
A
dwfiJ Pdlockhouseiiold
56: ai The by
The register entry showing Enid Blyton’s neighbours and
household members - as found using piece/item search.
28 Famiyfiee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Getting to grips with a new resource
Those who contributed to the war
effort at home, had not yet joined up,
or were conscientious objectors should
be listed. The household registration
form had a separate column asking
for details of ‘Membership of Naval,
Military or Air Force Reserves or
Auxiliary Forces or of Civil Defence
Services or Reserves’. Follow up on
this war service, by searching for
surviving records. Although few
records survive for those who worked
in Air Raid Precautions (ARP), some
details could be found by searching
local newspapers and some ARP
records may be found at local record
offices. The West Yorkshire Archive
Service holds a good collection of
the West Riding of Yorkshire’s ARP
Service.
London Fire Brigade Museum has a
useful guide for researching Auxiliary
Fire Service and NFS members
within the capital and beyond: www.
london-fire.gov.uk/Research.asp. A
comprehensive list of online resources
can be found at archiveshub.ac.uk/
features/firefighters . shtml.
County Durham Home Guard
records are digitised at TNA www.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/
durham-home-guard.htm. Records
from other areas can be requested via
the Army Personnel Centre by next of
kin for £30.
Evacuation
Not all relatives were registered where
we expected to hnd them. While
some were staying temporarily in
hospitals or hotels, others had been
evacuated. Many of those evacuated
after 1 September returned and were
re-evacuated in a second wave of
evacuation, which took place from 13
June to ISJune 1940.
If you discover a relative was
evacuated, either as a child or as a
mother or teacher, you can follow this
up, as, although not easy to research,
some records of evacuation do exist.
Check with relevant archive or
school (both host and sending
schools) for log books, which can
give details on the related schools,
medical provision and so on, and
admission registers, which can include
not only the names of evacuees but
The 1939
Register was
key to the
administration
of ration cards
- with rationing
on the horizon,
starting in
January 1940.
“Search smarter
• In order to be as sure as possible
that you’ve found the right household
before you part with your £6.95, try
filtering the search results.
• Double-check the details such as
date of birth, the name of a second
household member, or try searching
with an address rather than a person.
• Check the preview page carefully.
This page is free to view and gives the
person’s name, year of birth, town and
county of residence.
• Where the entry reads, for instance,
‘2 more people’, search again using
names you believe should be there.
V J
also the names and addresses of their
hosts. London Metropolitan Archives
(LMA) reference LCC/EO/WAR
(Education Officer’s Department:
Emergency Wartime Measures) may be
useful for those whose ancestors were
evacuated from London: search the
LMA catalogue via www.cityoflondon.
gov.uk/lma. Further details can be
obtained via the Evacuees Reunion
Association (ERA) at www.evacuees.
org.uk.
Also check with the local record
office for any surviving parish
magazines 1938-1945 for the host
area and local newspapers which have
not yet been added to the British
Newspaper Archive online.
Continuing your search
Use your results to decide who to
search for next in the 1939 Register. If
you are doing extensive research, it may
be worth visiting The National Archives,
where you can search the complete
register for free. Using the advanced
search with care can also help to find
information for free without the need
to check the full record. Otherwise, for
those happy to wait, the register will
eventually be included in a Findmypast
.co.uk subscription.
ww w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 Family-rree 29
O pen fields once covered
the English landscape. In
medieval times farming
was based on the open
field system, which was vital to lower-
class livelihoods for the domestic
cultivation of crops or grazing of
animals. Surveys and excavations in
Northamptonshire have shown the
underlying pattern of open fields dates
from before the Norman Conquest.
But the heavy hand of the ‘haves’ over
the ‘have-nots’ is vividly illustrated
by the stealthy progression of land
enclosure across the country between
the 13th and 20th centuries.
Enclosures restricted the rural poor’s
access to the land, as an unfolding net
of field boundaries was laid over the
countryside. The plan was to make a
more efficient and economic use of
resources, and in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Parliamentary enclosure
acts ran concurrent with revolutionary
advances in technology, leading many
agricultural labourers to leave the land
of their forefathers for work in London
and the industrial towns.
John Clare & enclosure
The ‘Inclosure’ Acts issued by
Parliament from the 1750s had
a profound effect on the lives of
agricultural labourers - and none
more so than in Northamptonshire,
where enclosure was particularly
stringent in the first half of the 19th
century. In one especially famous
instance, at the village of Helpston
in the north of the county, enclosure
from 1809 spawned a literary response
30 Familyriee Christmas 2015
in the works
of the ‘peasant
poet’, John Clare
(1793-1864). Although his artistic
sensibilities arose dissonantly
against his background as a farm
labourer, Clare’s poetry has given us
a permanent record of how enclosure
must have felt to the rural poor
who had lived off the land. Clare’s
poem ‘The Hail-Storm in June
1831’ - by which time the enclosure
awards affecting Helpston were
largely complete - infers that the
unrestrained season of freedom of the
open fields had turned to a winter of
greater poverty:
‘Darkness came o’er like chaos - and the
sun
As startled with the terror seemed to run
With quickened dread behind the beetling
cloud [...]
Till man from shelter ran and sought the
open field.’
An ag lab family
Some 20 miles from Helpston, land
around the villages of Stanion and
neighbouring Brigstock was enclosed by
Act of Parliament in 1795. A tyrannical
grid of field boundaries was awarded to
landowners - for Stanion this included
Lord Cardigan and the Duke of
Buccleuch - putting a stranglehold on ag
labs and their families, who had worked
the land for countless generations.
One such family were the Tilleys;
the surname occurs elsewhere, but
seems to owe its origins to the East
Midlands, chiefly Northamptonshire and
Lincolnshire. Records relating to the
Tilleys in Stanion survive from the late-
1700s, but they emerge more definitely
in the early 19th century. ‘Tilley’ itself
suggests a close association with the land
- ‘tillage’ and ‘tilling’ the soil - as much
as the place name Stanion (‘Stanere’ in
the Domesday Book) retains echoes of
Anglo-Saxon ‘stsenen, stsening’ or ‘stony
place’.
w ww.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
A. BMDregisters.co.uk
Provided in association with The National Archives
The efficial Non-i^iiloniiist website - freely serrch over S million indfyicluats
• Birth, Marriage and Death records from the
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Christmas 2015 Family’rree 31
THE LURE OF LONDON
Reader
story
r
f^CST^CtNStTS
l/Bese^seJc^
ll I
>\ uW'^®'pH,reseavc''
9^'"^ awards- y
landowners and occupiers, whose
plots can be located on the tithe
maps. TheGenealogist.co.uk, in
particular, has a comprehensive tithe
records collection for England and
Wales (in partnership with
TNA), covering 1837 to
the early 1850s (see www.
thegenealogist . CO .uk/
Tithe).
^Wale
f
The parish banner, by the altar in St
Peter’s, showing the coupling of the
parish with neighbouring Brigstock.
Maps & surnames
Enclosure around Stanion had begun
to take hold in 1635, when one of
the surrounding open helds of the
parish was partially enclosed. It is the
enclosure records that accompany
19th-century changes that really
begin to reveal signihcant details for
pinpointing family connections. The
enclosure awards name landowners
and the area apportioned. Such
records are held at The National
Archives (TNA) in Kew and in county
record offices.
Eollowing enclosure, the process of
tithe commutation led to the creation
of tithe maps and apportionments
and these are useful for tracing
those who actually worked the land
- the apportionments naming both
Tracing Tilleys
Tilley families appear
r to have been present in
Northamptonshire and
^ Lincolnshire for a century
and more by the time those living in
the area of Stanion and surrounding
parishes felt the pressure of enclosure.
Quite how deeply rooted the name
was in the East Midlands is attested
by documentation relating to the
earliest recorded mayor of the town of
Northampton itself, one William Tilly
[sic], in 1215, appointed by King John.
More recently, censuses of the mid-
19th century reveal Tilleys working as
agricultural labourers, weavers and
farm workers, and even boot or shoe
makers.
Among about 150 tithe
apportionment records for
parishes in Northamptonshire
(tithe apportionment microhlms
IR 29 at TNA), none is given for
Stanion, as tithes were commuted
following enclosure in 1795-1805.
However a speculative look at the
tithe apportionment for Brigstock
(two or three miles east of Stanion)
Some Tilleys
still dwelling
in Stanion
by the time
of the 1861
Census.
provides clues as to the circumstances
the Stanion Tilleys may have found
themselves in. In addition, the entry for
Stanion in Samuel Lewis’s Topographical
Dictionary of England of 1840 states that
The living is annexed to the vicarage
of Brigstock’ (the banner in St Peter’s
Church in Stanion couples the two
parishes), suggesting the 300 or so
inhabitants at the time were tied more
directly to the landowners than the
church.
The tithe hie for Stanion (IR 18
at TNA), drawn up by the revenue
authorities, and dated 1850 (with
additions and amendments up to
1858), indeed indicates that tithes
elsewhere indebted to vicar and rector
were not entirely relevant for this
particular community and parish. A
response to a query raised by the tithe
commissioners directs them to the
landowners themselves - it seems the
vicar in Stanion had no claim to any of
the revenue for lands detailed in the
tithe hie. Thus not all names linked to
places of known association are easily
traced in view of the subtleties and
complexities of tax and legislation.
London-bound
Several Tilleys - a John for instance -
hailed from elsewhere in the county,
and are listed as landowners in TNA’s
tithe apportionment records from
the 1840s onwards. With an increase
in movement for all strata of society,
hnding a connection among the Tilley
families across Northamptonshire is
very difficult in some cases, however
32 Famil^l
Free
Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Images: Northamptonshire countryside © David Hughes/Shutterstock; St Peter’s churchyard, parish banner & Ashby Tilley’s grave ©
Lee Sharpe; Stanion village sign by Uksignpix reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence;
tithe file document for Stanion courtesy David Lewiston Sharpe; John Clare photograph in the public domain.
From rural to city life
I am related to certain branches of
them.
Quite aside from changes in land
use, the effects of poor harvests due
to bad weather, as well as the period
of economic recession following
the Napoleonic Wars (after 1815),
would have bitten hard initially and
generated ripples thereafter. Along
with enclosure these factors can be
seen to affect how working lives were
changed: at the midpoint of the
century, around 20 per cent of the
national working male population
were agricultural labourers - towards
the end of the century this was halved.
The 1851 Census indicates one
of the Stanion Tilleys, James, had
made his way to London following
enclosures in the county he had called
home. His 14-year-old son was born in
1838 in Northamptonshire, and so the
relocation to London had happened a
generation or so after the implications
of enclosure would have been more
keenly felt in Stanion. James Tilley
was working as a boot maker - a trade
which he may have learned back in
Northamptonshire. The trip down the
old Great North Road (following the
route of the present Al) would have
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landed him not far from where the
census reveals he lived, a quarter of a
mile from Aldersgate Street where the
road virtually terminated.
Migrating away from the kind
of work in which his family had
been traditionally involved on the
land, shoemaking was a potentially
safer option for James, given its
prevalence across his county of
origin. Boot- and shoemaking is very
much a Northampton industry. A
centre for ‘cordwainers’ as far back
as the mid-15th century, there were
already nearly 2,000 shoemakers
in Northampton itself by the 1841
Census.
James’s nephew Frederick Alwyn
Tilley made the same journey from
Stanion to London in 1881, pursuing
the proverbial promise of fortune.
Though for Frederick’s brother,
Ashby Tom Tilley, the job of game
keeper to the Duke of Buccleuch had
kept him close to the land (there was
a pheasantry and deer park to the
north-east of the village), it may have
been the lack of agricultural work in
Stanion that urged Frederick away, or
his injury, being blinded in one eye
by a blade of grain stubble, after a fall
in a ploughed held.
Frederick eventually
took a clerk’s job at a
engineering hrm in
London.
According to a
family legend, he
had walked the
entire journey
to London from
Northamptonshire.
Perhaps along the
Great North Road,
which his uncle had
no doubt followed
to set up his boot-
making activities
the other side of
Liverpool Street. At
the end of July 1841,
Queries raised by the
tithe commissioners,
and a response from
the vicar at Stanion
explaining how income
from the land pertained
to landowners, not
church coffers.
^ Read up on it
• My Ancestor was an Agricultural
Labourer by Ian H Waller (Society of
Genealogists, 2007);
• Essential Maps for Family Historians
by Charles Masters (Countryside
Books, 2009);
• Tracing Ancestors in
Northamptonshire by Colin R Chapman
(Lochin Publishing, 2nd ed, 2000).
All available at Family Tree’s
Family History Bookshop, www.
familyhistorybookshop.co.uk.
V J
the poet John Clare had walked the
same road - in the opposite direction -
from an asylum in Epping, via Enheld
in what is now North London, back
to Northamptonshire and the much-
changed land of his forefathers.
A John Tilley, who passed away in
Ufford within a year of John Clare’s
death, had lived just a couple of miles
from the poet’s beloved Helpston. John,
of comparable age according to the
records, may have been the labourer
who in the 1861 Census was living
with his wife and grandson in Stanion,
where he had been for more than 30
years. John’s Stanion-born son James
lived adjacent, with his family, working
as a stone cutter; there were substantial
quarries north of the village.
The traditional ways of agricultural
life were gone, and Frederick Tilley’s
grandfather died in 1895 at the
Kettering Union Workhouse.
The grave of
Ashby Tilley in St
Peter’s churchyard,
Stanion. His son
Frederick Alwyn
Tilley is said to
have walked to
London, following
the decline in farm
work.
avtffior
David Lewiston Sharpe is a
freelance music teacher and writer,
and has published on history,
literature, language and genealogy.
He has been researching his family
history for more than 20 years, and is
following several strands of his family
in southern England, Ireland, Poland,
Germany and Australia. The Jewish
origins of ‘Lewiston’ are a prime focus of
his research.
Christmas 2015 Famiyitee 33
TAKING THE WATERS
After finding an ancestor living at a mystery spa on the 1851
Census, Sue Hassett set off on a research journey into the
fascinating world of hot springs and alternative therapies.
H ow many people find a
Georgian spa in the family
I wonder? It was the last
thing I expected when I
began researching my paternal ancestry
some years ago.
The popular spa towns favoured
by the wealthy in the 18th and 19th
centuries are well known and the
practice of travelling to hot and cold
springs in search of a cure dates back
to ancient times. The remains of
Roman baths in Bath, Buxton and York
are evidence of this.
But how many have heard of a
tiny spa in rural Somerset called
Capland Spa? I first came across it on
the 1851 Census when investigating
the background of my 2x great-
grandmother, Sarah Rose Walker. I
already knew she came from a little
place called Capland, just a few miles
from Ilminster, but I was unfamiliar
with the area.
In 1851 her family was living in
‘Walker’s Cottage’ and I noticed that
close by another family of Walkers of
the right age to be her grandparents
lived at ‘Capland Spa’. This triggered
an interesting trail of research.
Where to begin?
Firstly, I Googled it but without
success. So next I tried the
British Newspaper Archive (BNA,
britishnewspaperarchive . co .uk and
at Findmypast.co.uk) and here I
struck gold. I found advertisements in
newspapers from around the country
for something called ‘The European
Institution of Health’, based at Capland
Spa, near Taunton. The adverts
appeared in the mid-1840s when, the
1841 Census confirmed, the Walker
family lived there. So were these people
my ancestors and what on earth was this
pretentious-sounding establishment?
The birth, marriage and death
records on the popular genealogy
websites failed to provide a link
between my 2x great-grandmother, her
father, Thomas Walker and the elder
Thomas Walker of Capland Spa, but
- given the names, proximity and fact
both men were tailors - I was pretty
convinced Thomas Walker the elder
was my ancestor. I confirmed this via
a newspaper report about Capland
Spa that appeared in a Taunton paper
in 1931, which referred to Thomas
Walker’s granddaughter, a Mrs Anna
Meare - the married name of my 2x
great-grandmother’s sister. It’s amazing
how information that doesn’t appear
in the official records can come to
light in a newspaper report more than
a century later!
Alternative therapies
I Still had very little information about
the spa itself and adverts for The
European Institution of Health weren’t
much help. They made no reference to
Thomas Walker.
A little reading around the subject
informed me that, much like today,
alternative healing practices flourished
in the 19th century. Hydropathy
■ 'Ty
H
M
Mysterious address: Thomas Walker and family at Capland Spa on the 1851 Census.
34 Familyitee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Taking the waters’ was very popular in earlier times, as this illustration of a spa well in
Harrogate in 1 829 shows.
I
for example, a therapy involving
immersion in hot and cold baths and
stressing the importance of diet and a
healthy environment, was introduced
to England in the 1840s and attracted
many famous patients including
Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and
Florence Nightingale. The ancient
practice of homeopathy also achieved
great popularity. Both these therapies
were reputable and considering that
mainstream medicine at the time
favoured bloodletting and purging,
which frequently made conditions
worse, alongside a range of highly
addictive drugs including opium, it’s
easy to see why many were drawn to
more benign alternatives.
The so-called European Institution
of Health, however, was less reputable.
The advertisements made ludicrous
claims about curing everything
from deafness and blindness to fits,
agues, hysteria and even lunacy. No
cure, no charge inducements were
offered and the whole operation
smacked of modern commercialism.
The purveyors of these miraculous
products were Messrs McKinsey. So
where did my ancestor fit in? Am I
descended from a charlatan?
I later discovered that ‘Messrs’
McKinsey were in fact one man, a
Henry John McKinsey who in the
1861 Census styled himself a ‘patent
medicine proprietor’ and who from
around 1850 was based on the
outskirts of Exeter. Quite possibly
Thomas Walker believed that by
associating himself with this shady
operator he might bring the spa to the
attention of a wider public.
story of the spa
I continued to plough through the
BNA and eventually came across
other articles relating directly to my
ancestor and to the hot spring itself,
and little by little I pieced together the
story of the forgotten spa.
In 1815 the Taunton reported
that the spring had been discovered
by a Rev Wood on Thomas Walker’s
property. Keen to promote the
efficacy of the valuable asset gushing
from his land, Thomas devised a plan
to exploit its potential. Three furnaces
were installed in the room where the
well was sunk for the evaporation
of the salts, which were tested and
found to be of the same chemical
composition and quality as those at
Cheltenham Spa.
The healing properties of water
and salts became well known and
both were widely distributed. Local
people could buy a glass of the water
for Id. However, my ancestor was not
satisfied with purely local trade. In
order to accommodate visitors from
further aheld, a building called The
Round House was put up adjoining his
own home. The enterprise was clearly
taking off and between 1815 and 1855
the spa gained quite a reputation. The
so-called ‘chalybeate’ waters (meaning
iron-rich) also contained iodine, an
effective remedy for skin disorders,
including scrofula, around since
medieval times and sometimes known
as the ‘King’s evil’.
So if the waters were so beneficial,
I began to wonder why Capland Spa
long ago vanished into obscurity,
particularly as one report suggested
that, with sufficient investment and
more aggressive promotion, it could
have become a fashionable resort.
Beginning of the end
The answer seems to be Thomas’s
death, reported in The North Devon
Journal in 1855. He apparently
dropped dead while walking home
from Hatch Beauchamp Baptist
Chapel and an inquest gave the verdict
‘death by visitation of Cod’. This was
a fairly common verdict at the time,
when coroners had no idea about
the cause of death. Probably it was
nothing more sinister than a heart
attack. But whatever it was, it was the
beginning of the end for the spa.
It seems no one else in the family
was interested in developing the
spa further. They were tailors after
Capland Spa is carved into the stone-
work over the front door of the surviving
house, hinting at its exotic past.
A curious census find
Advertisement for the European Institution
of Health at Capland Spa, in the Oxford
University and City Herald, 1 845.
all! At some point the well was Riled
in and the room was later used as a
cider cellar. The Round House for
many years served as a school and was
demolished after 1958.
When Thomas’s widow sold the
property in 1866 it appears Capland
Spa, the health resort, plunged into
oblivion.
Capland Spa today
So what remains of the spa? The house,
though probably much altered, is still
there with the name Capland Spa
legible in the stonework above the front
door. The Round House is long gone,
as is any other evidence of a medicinal
hot spring.
Capland today is as tiny as in the 19th
century; no more than a scattering
of houses a mile or so outside the
village of Hatch Beauchamp. It’s
hard to imagine it might ever have
posed a threat to the likes of Bath or
Harrogate!
Nevertheless I applaud my ancestor,
Thomas, for his enterprise and who
knows perhaps the hot spring is still
bubbling away underground awaiting
rediscovery and all the fame and
fortune that passed it by.
And to think this all arose from a
curious address on a census record!
For many years Sue Hassett worked
as a teacher of English to foreign
students. Around 2000 she started
writing short stories and was delighted
to have several published nationally. Her
interest in family history began some
six years ago and since then she has
written a detailed account of the lives of tz:-
her paternal ancestors, which she has had the
pleasure of sharing with family members.
Christmas 2015 Family’rree 35
S everal years ago I approached
publishers with an idea for
a book about my mother’s
adventures in 1950s’ America.
Gwenda, then a 23-year-old nurse,
had left the UK in 1957 with her
best friend Pat to work for a year at
a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. One
of the first things they did was buy
an old car, and they went travelling
at every opportunity. Eventually they
took off on an 18-month-long road
trip with three new friends, Molly,
Maureen and Celia, to see the rest
of the country. One editor said that
she might have been interested in
the story if the subjects had been
well known figures, but as I tend to
find the lives of ordinary folk just as
interesting as the famous, I refused to
let that comment deter me. I carried
on with my efforts and ultimately my
book. Bedpans and Bobby Socks, was
published by Sphere, an imprint of
the Little, Brown Book Group (www.
littlebrown. CO .uk) .
I am not saying this to show off, nor
to suggest that everyone’s family story
can be sold to a traditional publisher
with a bit of perseverance - though if
you think you’re sitting on something
special, it might be worth a try. But I
do believe that even stories that lack
obvious commercial appeal can, with
some discipline and imagination, be
written down so that others can read
and enjoy them too.
What makes a good story?
Whether it’s your own or someone
else’s, a good tale is rarely a life
lived from A to Z, or a simple
amalgamation of facts. (One person
I know has written a tome about his
family so vast and so comprehensive
that, though an invaluable reference
book, it will probably never be
read.) No, most of the best reads are
accounts of part of a life - perhaps of
a childhood, or a life lived in wartime, '
or an interesting career.
So find your subject and make it
your guiding star - though your story
will inevitably make detours here
and there and be all the better for it.
It helps to be able to sum it up in a
sentence. I suppose mine for Bedpans
and Bobby Socks is explained in the
book’s subtitle: ‘Five British nurses on
the American road trip of a lifetime’.
It isn’t a book about nursing - though
that comes into it; it isn’t a travel
book - though thousands of miles are
covered. It is about five young women
and their interactions with the people
and places they visit at a time when
such a journey was unusual enough
to make newspaper headlines, which
indeed it did!
36 Family’itee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Shutterstock images: Countryside road, faii season
in Coiorado © f1 1 photo; sunrise iooking out over th(
Garden of The Gods and Pike’s Peak in Coiorado
Springs, Coiorado © Sarah Fieids Photography.
Other images author’s own coiiection.
How to write up your family tales
As every family historian knows, the life of an ‘ordinary’ ancestor can be just as
interesting and full of adventure as that of any famous personality; but not all J
publishers can see the potential in the stories of everyday folk. Barbara Fox 1
knows that shouldn’t put off budding authors and instead offers tips on how tm
write a family story that everyone will want to read^^^^^mi|||[|[||fe^B^^fl
{jiw WE gpf ;?) iHrmintti iurjisr**
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THO SCftTHS WtTM EVERY LIKELIHOOD OF THIFffJ ON sa CAlhMG{mAiY
ABOUT 13 FOR LEITH AfC NEFOASTLE ADVISE SY WIFE
D R TDtfH3E«D
An old shopping list from the road trip days.
Christmas 2015 Familyrree 37
www.family-tree.co.uk
A telegram booking passage home.
The five road
trip nurses
and a friend
at the Hotel
Colorado,
Glenwood
Springs, CO
r yf^ ry-.: /h h ^
f*.
f 1
I <WSw
■“ -I
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WESTERN UNION
3l
aaalt.r4
TELEGRAM
W. P. I.UL.
iLTryr
*w
HONE YOUR SKILLS
Gwenda on horseback
in Colorado.
The car, en route to Alaska, with
Maureen in the back.
^ StMwic Wondm
SINCLAIR
38 Familyfiee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
How to write up your family tales
[Sources of inspiration & fact^
I was fortunate with the resources I
had at my disposal. Gwenda and Pat,1
I now both in their eighties, had left
I an amazing legacy behind them; the]
I hundreds of letters they had written 1
home to their parents. When Gwenda]
decided to type up hers, I read them |
for the hrst time and heard her voice ^
I at once familiar and unknown - speak '
I out to me across the years. I suppose .
f that was when it dawned on me just
how special her experience had been.^
For quite apart from adventures I had '
heard before, like breaking down on \
] the Alaska Highway and drinking tea ^
I at gunpoint in a deserted ski lodge
] (yes, really!), the letters told me howj
shocking and exciting it had been
j to hnd herself in this alien society, ^
one in which women her mother’s
I age wore shorts in public, even the
hospital orderly came to work by car,'^
and everyone from the cleaner to the ’
’ top surgeon sat down together in the
1 hospital canteen. And her reactions
told me just as much about the post-
L war Britain she had left behind.
There was also a trunk full of paper!
[ treasures that told stories of their own]
[-photos, postcards, signed napkins ,
I and menus, shopping lists, tourist i
leaflets... As Gwenda is usually quite]
ruthless about throwing things away,
! who knows what your own searches i
might unearth! Time can enrich the]
most mundane item with meaning j
and once it is waved in front of the ^
nose of its owner, it will undoubtedly]
[ unlock some memories, i
» But without letters, without^
f ephemera, how else do we hnd ourl
[ stories? The most obvious answer is ,
[ to ask questions. Emails or letters
are a great way to get things started.]
I hnd quite specihc questions work i
best. ‘Tell me about your childhood’!
^ is just too open. Instead try, ‘What
L was it like being the oldest/youngest/T
’ only child?’; ‘Was it a hard life for j
your mother?’. Then follow thisj
, up with a conversation. (With i
Christmas approaching and family]
reunions taking place, what better T
opportunity!) A conversation that is^
, allowed to ebb and how is a wonderful j
[tool for stimulating memorie^
Someone who confessed in his letters"]
to having little recall of his wartime |
childhood suddenly opened up over]
a relaxing pub meal and regaled me]
^with a whole wealth of stories! i
I Photos are also an excellent way"!
fof loosening memories, and if there!
I are no family albums to pore over, ^
; what about one of those books of old]
picture postcard^
I Get to know their world]
' If there are other people you can1
question, then do. I wrote to some]
; of Gwenda and Pat’s old friends i
I in America to hnd out what they 1
remembered about the days they ]
I shared. I also had great fun delving!
into 1950s America, becoming an
expert - for a short while! - in its 1
1 books and hlms, its politics and so cial]
issues, and even its cars, to better |
1 understand the world my charac ters]
[were living i n.j
Let your characters shine]
Ranting to make the tale as fresh j
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 Family’rree 39
HONE YOUR SKILLS
T
How to write up your family stories
' sounding as possible, I wrote the
book in the hrst person, taking on^H
Gwenda’s persona. It felt strange at V
first, but once I allowed her to speak m
she quickly took over. I found that by \
creating a slightly exaggerated version
of her - and indeed of all of the
characters - they came across more b
. vividly on paper. Don’t be afraid to
have some fun with them!
m Do allow your characters to talk
[ to each other. A book that is all
reported speech, or none at all, can ■
become monotonous. Re-imagining
conversations, providing they remain 1
true to the speaker’s character, is a <j(l
great way to bring your writing to life ^
as well as to convey information. JBH
Look for new perspectives v
The outsider’s eye that gave Gwenda’s 1
story its unique perspective was the Jjl
selling point of my own memoir. Is
the Vicar In, Pet?. It’s about growing
up in a vicarage in the 1970s in a
place called Ashington, then known^
as the largest pit village in the world. M
Arriving in this tight knit community 1
from the city, I saw wonder in the 'ij/M
mundane - even outside lavatories
seemed exotic to my eyes as a
newcomer! Perhaps not surprisingly,^
I sometimes felt as if I was writing
about an era earlier than the nurses’ M
glamorous 1950s USA, but that only
helped to conhrm it was a tale worth ■
telling.
P My next book. When the War Is Over,
will be published by Sphere in April
2016 and is about Gwenda’s evacuation J
to a village in the Lake District during H
the Second World War. This time
there were even fewer resources, apart H
from my mother’s vivid memory and a H
handful of photos. But once I began, I I
felt as if I was entering familiar territory 1
with so much historical information M|l
readily available online and so many
hlms and books to draw inspiration
from. I also included memories of other!
wartime children in order to provide fljl
a counterpoint to Gwenda’s somewhat H
happier experience.
ft Whatever you decide to do, good
luck. And remember that once you have 1
your story, discipline and imagination
really are your best tools!
Barbara Fox grew up in Newcastle
and now lives in West Sussex with
her husband and two sons. Her
books Bedpans and Bobby Socks,
One Girl and Her Dogs and Is the
Vicar in, Pet? are all published by
Little, Brown. When the War Is Over
will be published next year. She is
determined to write a novel one day
but keeps getting caught up in real
lives instead!
Barbara with her sisters at an abandoned
colliery that lay behind the local churchyard
in Ashington, taken after the family’s move
to the mining town in 1969. Left to right:
Barbara. Sarah and Ruth.
HUMBLE
Tourist leaflets
from the 1 950s.
40 Family’ltee Christmas 2015
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Christmas 2015 Family’rree 41
Family
heirloom:
the veil that
connects six
generations.
When Caroline Makein inherited a beautiful lace veil she became fascinated
by the story behind it.
W hen I became custodian
of an Irish lace veil, I
was curious to discover
more about this precious
family heirloom and especially
the brides who wore it. My mother
thought it was probably Limerick lace
and my grandmother had helpfully
left a letter naming some of the
women who had worn it, the earliest
wedding taking place in 1830.
Limerick lace
I learned that the Limerick lace
industry was established in 1829 when
businessman, Charles Walker, located
to Limerick with lace-makers brought
from England and he opened a
tambour lace factory. From its origins
until about 1870, lace was produced
in factories; after this time it was
produced mostly in workshops and
homes.
There are two kinds of Limerick
lace, Tambour’, which is worked with a
hne hook, and ‘needlerun’ lace, which
is worked with a needle. Tambour
lace is sewn onto net stretched across
a frame, like a tambourine, and
stitches are worked onto the net in a
cotton thread, using a tambour hook.
Needlerun lace is where the stitches
are darned with a sewing needle on to
a net; this type was introduced in the
late 1830s byjonas Rolf.
Lace-making gave employment
to thousands of women, especially
during the famine years, with Catholic
nuns introducing it to convents and
religious houses throughout Ireland.
It was estimated that in 1851 each lace-
maker maintained two or three other
family members. Large-scale factory-
based lace manufacture collapsed in
the 1860s with the introduction of
machine-made lace from Nottingham,
though it revived again in the 1880s
and into the early 20th century, mostly
made by home workers.
The first bride?
Tambour Limerick lace was available
from 1829, so it is just possible that my
3x great-grandmother, Jane Kennedy,
purchased the veil to wear when she
married James Agnew Greene at
Lisburn Cathedral on 13 September,
1830. The veil would have then been
the height of fashion.
Jane’s parents were Samuel Kennedy
of Grovegreen, Lisburn, andjane
Carson, and I know very little about
them apart from they are buried
beneath a gravestone in Blaris
Cemetery, Lisburn. Sadly there is no
picture of Jane Kennedy, though we
Silhouette of James Agnew Greene,
pro-collector of customs, Belfast.
do have a silhouette of her husband,
probably pre-dating their marriage.
My grandfather’s research noted
that James Greene was a customs
officer for the Port of Belfast and
lived at 6 College Square East. I
conhrmed this online at www.proni.
gov.uk where the street directories
42 Familyltee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Images: Silhouette courtesy of Mrs EJ Darbyshire; Limerick lace detail, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
Share Alike 4.0 International licence; all other images courtesy of the author.
Family Brides Who Wore the VeU
Lace heirloom
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Generation tree
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Belfast Newsletter
1900 for Joseph
Rea’s business.
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Joseph Rea, Caroline’s great-grandfather, in his
electoral picture in 1 908.
for Belfast and the Province of
Ulster are freely available. James
worked at the Customs House on
the corner of Hanover Quay and was
the ‘first clerk’ there from at least
1831-1847, and about 1844 he moved
to 5 The Crescent, Botanic Road.
The Northern WAig’ newspaper of 17
October 1833 reported the discovery
of smuggled spirits on a boat and
the subsequent court case when Mr
James Greene, pro-collector in the
Belfast Customs House, was named
as having received the conhscated
liquor. James predeceased his wife
on 27 February 1864 leaving her and
his merchant son, John Kennedy
Greene, as executors. According to his
will his two married daughters, Mrs
Elizabeth McConnell and Mrs Jane
Harris (my 2x great-grandmother),
‘have each received their fair and
just proportions of my property I will
devise and bequeath to each of them
the nominal sum of one shilling each’.
His other two unmarried daughters
received £250.
On 30 April 1862 James and Jane’s
daughter, Jane, wore the same veil as
she followed in her mother’s footsteps
down the aisle of Lisburn Cathedral,
to marry Mervyn Henry Harris. He
formerly lived at the Northern Bank
House, Keady, Co Armagh, and was
the son of the Reverend George
Harris and Elizabeth Gray. According
to the 1884 Belfast and Province of Ulster
Directory, Mervyn was a commission
agent living at 24 Fleetwood Street,
Belfast.
Was Jane a suffragette?
Jane and Mervyn Harris had eight
children; their second daughter, Jane
(called Joan by the family), was born
on 15 September 1878. She became
the third bride to use the veil when
she married my great-grandfather,
Joseph Rea, on 2 June 1903, at St
Comgall’s Parish Church in Bangor.
That same year Emmeline Pankhurst
started the Women’s Social and
Political Union (WSPU) to hght
for votes for women. Did Jane/Joan
sympathise with the movement?
History doesn’t relate the tale,
but her new husband, Joseph, had
strong political, religious and moral
convictions.
A member of the Crescent
Presbyterian Church and prominent
in the Bible Temperance Society in
1892, there was a complaint in the
Belfast Newsletter on 8 June 1899 by
the Belfast Family Grocers’ and Spirit
Dealers’ regarding a speech he had
made describing the shops of spirit
grocers as ‘dens of iniquity’. In 1895
he established Joseph Rea and Son, an
engineers’ representatives business,
at 32 Ann Street, Belfast. In 1908 he
was elected town councillor for the
Dufferin Ward of Bangor.
A long partnership
Joan bore him two sons and three
daughters, the hrst being my
grandfather, John (Jack) Harris Rea,
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 Familyrree 43
LOOKING BACK SIX GENERATIONS
T
born 16 September 1904 at Bangor.
Jack married the fourth veil-wearing
bride, Isobel McCaw, on 2 June 1931
at Magherally Parish Church near
Banbridge. In 1981, 1 attended their
golden wedding party, kept secret
from them until the last minute; it was
a very happy occasion celebrating a
long loving partnership.
In October 1931 the veil had
another outing when Jack’s sister,
Joan, married John McQuoid at
Groomsport Parish Church, Bangor.
My newly-married grandparents
smiled happily in the family group
photograph, despite the weddings
taking place during the Depression
in the 1930s! And, judging by the
photographs, they didn’t stint on the
flowers at either wedding.
The fifth generation wedding
was my parents, Eleanor Rea and
Pat Darbyshire, who married in
January 1953, in Newry. My mother’s
dress made from gold brocade
complemented the veil beautifully. By
the summer of 1975, when I returned
home to Scotland to be married, the
white wedding dress I
chose simply wouldn’t
have looked right with
the lace veil, which had
faded to an ivory colour. It
fell to my youngest sister,
Claire, to become the
sixth generation and most
recent bride to wear the
veil three years later.
Now the delicate
lace is carefully stored
away in acid-free tissue
paper awaiting a 21st
century bride, perhaps
one of our daughters or
granddaughters - the
tail-end of this veil’s
185-year history. V*"
The wedding of author’s
grandparents, John Rea
and Isobel McCaw, 2 June
1931.
Family group at Joan Rea’s wedding in October 1931 . Back row, starting far left: Jack
and Isobel Rea, then Harry Rea and the groom, John McQuoid.
Find out more
• A Dictionary of Lace by Pat
Earnshaw (Dover Press, 1999).
• Annazing Lace: A History of the
Limerick Lace Industry by Dr Matthew
Potter (Limerick Museum & Archives,
2014).
• Tracing Your Irish Ancestors by John
Grenham (Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2012).
• www.proni.gov.uk - For online
records such as wills and Post Office
Directories.
• www.britishnewspaperarchive.
co.uk - For newspaper archives.
• www.visionofireland.org -
Research Ireland 1821-2001.
• www.limerick.ie/
historicalresources/limerickarchives/
limericklace - Read about the
Limerick lace project.
• www.nidirect.gov.uk/family-
history - To research Irish family
history.
• rosemarycathcart.blogspot.co.uk
-A pictorial blog on Irish lace.
V J
The author’s parents, Pat Darbyshire and
Eleanor Rea, on their wedding day on
3 January 1953.
Zifjout {fte aufftor
Caroline Makein has worked
for many years as a professional
genealogist researching throughout
Scotland. She runs Fife Rootsearch,
a research service at www.
scottishgenealogyresearch.co.uk.
She has a certificate in Scottish
Family Flistory Studies from Stirling
University and she is a member of
both the Scottish Genealogical Society and
the Scottish Genealogy Network.
V y
44 Familyriee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
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GRAND SPAS
The Grand Spas of Central Europe
If you enjoyed learning about our ancestors’ fondness for spas in
Sue Hassett’s story this issue (pp34-35), then you’ll love reading
more about the topic in The Grand Spas of Central Europe: A History
of Intrigue, Politics, Art, and Healing. This new book by David Clay
Large, senior fellow at the University of California’s Institute
of European Studies, presents the first major study of grand
European spas in English. Take an irresistible tour through grand
spa towns such as Baden-Baden, Bad Ems, Bad Gastein, Karlsbad
and Marienbad, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, with
special focus on the era between the Erench Revolution and WW2.
Conventional medicine being quite primitive for much of history,
many people went to spas in hopes of curing everything from
cancer to gout. But ‘curists’ also went to play, be entertained and
to socialise and, in their heyday, the grand spas were hotbeds of
cultural creativity and even high-level politics, where treaties were
negotiated, craft alliances formed and wars planned.
Published in hardback and as an ebook by Rowman &: Littlefield
Publishers (RRP £23.95, ISBN: 9781442222373).
Food, glorious food
Discover what your ancestors ate and drank, their
table manners, culinary traditions and more in these
two delectable new hardback titles from Amberley
Publishing, The Tudor Kitchen by Terry Breverton (RRP
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Christmas 2015
Tree 47
MOMENTS HUMBLE & PROUD
Reader
story
My personal
Magna Carta
connection
When Jeffrey Wayne Seemans began his genealogical adventure in August
2014, he never imagined that his search would end with a personal ancestral
connection to the Magna Carta - a discovery that he made just prior to the
800th anniversary to celebrate this world-changing medieval document.
M yjourney began in 2014
when I saw an episode
of ‘Who Do You Think
You Are?’ on television,
which mentioned the College of Arms
in London. I wrote a letter inquiring
whether the college could help me
verify that one of my ancient ancestors,
a Sir William Blakiston, Lord of
Blakiston, really did exist in the late
1300s.
Back in 1994 I had been given
some family genealogical charts
that included him. I had hired Mary
Abel, a genealogist from the State of
Maryland, to do some family research,
and she had provided me with a wealth
of information about the Blakiston
side of the Seemans family. However,
I waited too long to ask her how she
discovered these relatives from so long
ago, and when I called her home last
year, I was told by her daughter that she
had passed away. I would now have to
begin this journey of rediscovery on my
own.
I soon received a response to my
letter to the College of Arms. It would
be pleased to look into the matter
if and when I sent it a cheque for a
considerable amount. I decided to take
another route.
I soon realised that I needed to hnd
a genealogist in England, and, with
48 Family^ Christmas 2015
a bit of wonderful luck, I discovered
Ros Bott from Warwickshire, on the
internet. She provided me with a
link to British History Online, www.
british-history.ac.uk, which included
the Blakiston family pedigree within
a publication dating from 1823: The
History and Antiquities of the County
Palatine of Durham: vol. 3: Stockton and
Darlington wards by Robert Surtees,
a famous Durham genealogist from
that era. To my amazement, many of
the names and dates on the pedigree
matched the details on my Blakiston
family charts that had been sent to
me by my Maryland genealogist in the
1990s.
My connection to the ancient
Blakiston family is through my
great-grandmother, Mary Ellen
Blakiston Thomas. She and my
great-grandfather, John Lambert
Seemans, died in the mid-1920s
almost 30 years before I was born,
but I have excellent photographs of
them and have visited the cemetery
in Smyrna, Delaware, where they are
both buried. The Blakiston family
in America can be traced to several
ancestors from England. My ancestor is
George Blakiston who immigrated to
the colonies in 1668, specihcally to St
Mary’s County, Maryland.
Born on 1 March 1611, he was a
mercer, councillor, and alderman. His
father was Rev Marmaduke Blakiston
of Newton Hall, Durham. George
married at St Andrew’s, Newcastle-
upon-Tyne, Northumberland, on
15 October 1638. In 1660, his life
changed forever. Upon the Restoration
in England, all of his property was
conhscated, although the Corporation
of Newcastle granted him £500
because ‘he did many good services for
this town’. His brother, John Blakiston,
esq, was one of the regicide judges
who signed the death warrant of
King Charles I on 29 January 1648/9.
Clearly, George became ‘collateral
damage’ given what his brother had
done. In due course, he left England
for the colonies, but only lived another
year and died in 1669. However, it
seems that English justice, of a sort,
was later bestowed upon the American
branch of the Blakiston family. My
great-grandmother’s great-grandfather,
Benjamin Blakiston, was granted
2,500 acres of land called ‘Deer Park’
from Charles, Lord Baltimore, in
1746. Perhaps this made up for what
happened to his ancestor George
back in 1660 in England. George’s
family remained in the colonies, as did
successive generations all the way to my
great-grandmother Mary Ellen.
Being interested in the history of
w ww.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
Image: marbled paper © Andy Magee/Shutterstock.
How published pedigrees heiped my research
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Royal Descents of 600 Immigrants to the American Colonies or the United States is
available to search on Ancestry.co.uk or in printed form from Genealogical.com.
the families that had immigrated to
the colonies, I came across a book at
the Delaware Historical Society in
Wilmington, Delaware: Royal Descents of
600 Immigrants to the American Colonies
or the United States authored by Gary
Boyd Roberts (2008). Within the pages
George Blakiston’s lineage back to
Edward III, King of England, was laid
out right before my eyes!
I thought that such a discovery
would be the final concluding success
of my genealogical journey, but the
internet played one more important
role. It revealed that George Blakiston
was also related to John Eitz Robert of
Warkworth, Northumberland, one of
the 25 surety barons who presented
King John with the Magna Carta on 15
June 1215.
I bought a four-volume book entitled,
Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial
and Medieval Families by Douglas
Richardson published in 2011, and
this showed every ancestor of George
Blakiston back to John Eitz Robert. I
Jeff’s connection to the ancient
Blakiston family is through his great-
grandmother, Mary Ellen Blakiston
Thomas, seen here with her husband,
Jeff’s great-grandfather, John Lambert
Seemans.
felt like I had just won the lottery! The
discovery occurred right before the
800th anniversary of the Magna Carta,
which is revered in America at least
as much as it is in England. Certainly,
our Declaration of Independence
and our United States Constitution
were influenced and inspired by it.
To discover such a personal family
connection to one of the most
important legal documents in the
world has been unlike anything I have
ever experienced. To be linked by even
a single thread has made me feel both
humble and proud.
Jeffrey Wayne Seemans lives in
Delaware, USA with his wife, Pamella,
an artist. Currently a landscape
architect, he plans to retire to Sussex
County, near the Atlantic Coast, and
enjoy his hobbies of golf, billiards and
family history.
Christmas 2015 Family' f^ 49
ADVERTISING FEATURE
3-month Gold subscription
Take advantage of a free three-month Gold Personal Premium subscription
to TheGenealogist.co.uk - worth £24.95 - to explore your family history this
Christmas. Laura Berry tells us what’s on offer.
T his issue every Family Tree
reader is invited to sign
up for a free three-month
Gold subscription to
TheGenealogist, where millions of
birth, marriage and death records
from England, Wales and overseas are
accessible, as well as census returns,
parish registers, wills, military records,
landowner returns, an image archive
and many other valuable resources.
The website has everything you need
to start building your family tree from
scratch and, for seasoned researchers,
TheGenealogist’s unique tools help to
bust those brickwalls, using the Master
Search and SmartSearch to home in on
elusive forebears.
First steps
With the General Register Office
(GRO) indexes to births, marriages and
deaths available on TheGenealogist
from 1837-2005, you can build your
family tree working back through time.
The certificates need to be ordered
from www.gro.gov.uk, and give both
parents’ names on birth certificates,
including the mothers’ maiden names,
fathers’ names on marriage certificates
and often next-of-kin on death certifi-
cates. They also describe your ancestors’
occupations and tell you where they
lived.
These records form the basic build-
ing blocks, alongside census returns
taken every 10 years from 1841 and
available up to 1911. The censuses offer
a snapshot of the household on a given
evening and contain some fascinat-
ing details. Records reveal it was all
too much for 60-year-old John Wint of
Brockley, who described his wife Jane as
a ‘household slave’ on their 1911 Census
return and scrawled ‘Why don’t you
enquire how many teeth I have in my
head!’.
Finding elusive ancestors
You can search the censuses a variety
of ways on TheGenealogist, selecting to
either look for a person, a family group
or an address on the Master Search.
This wide range of options helps to
identify slippery ancestors and those
with common surnames. The person
search has a keyword box for any words
that you would expect to see, like an
occupation, place of birth or address.
Ancestors’ names don’t always ap-
pear in the records as we might expect.
As well as using wildcards and playing
around with the phonetic and stand-
ard surname filters to look for variant
spellings, you can leave the name boxes
blank, entering just a keyword, year
of birth and selecting a county - par-
ticularly useful for identifying name
variations.
Going further
The Gold subscription includes a
major collection of wills proved in
the Prerogative Court of Canterbury
from 1384 to 1858, as well as calendars
to probate records from lesser
ecclesiastical courts. Wills usually
mention many close relations, and it’s
not uncommon to discover family feuds
resulting in people being disinherited.
Parish records take us back beyond
1837 when civil registration began, but
if your relatives don’t appear in the
Anglican church registers perhaps they
belonged to a Nonconformist congrega-
tion. Registers of ceremonies performed
by Presbyterian, Congregationalist,
Baptist, Quaker, Methodist, Catholic,
Unitarian and other dissenting minis-
ters can be searched right back to the
mid-1600s on TheGenealogist. Along-
side these, you have access to electoral
records, directories, school and college
registers and a wealth of military
collections.
About the author
Laura Berry is a freelance
researcher and one of the
principal genealogists for
the ‘Who Do You Think You
Are?’ TV series. She also
assists the MoD and DNA
specialists with genealogical
research to identify soldiers’ remains
recovered from WW1 battlefields. Laura
has written about family history for
many publications and worked on TV
shows including ‘So You Think You’re
Royal?’ and ‘Not Forgotten’.
I « id I
i
lAi
Elusive ancestors: a search on the 191 1 Census for Alfred
Marks and wife Marie, whose profession is given as ‘militant
suffragette’.
The actual image of the Marks family’s household schedule
further reveals that ‘a number of militant suffragettes’ were on
the premises on census night in 1911.
50 Family^'ree Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Gold holly © Marilyn Barbone/Shutterstock.
TheGenealogist special offer
FREE for every reader!
Getting started
Signing up for your free subscription is
quick and easy - simply fill in your details
at www.TheGenealogist.co.uk/FT3FREE
and enter your special voucher code (see
bottom of this page).
Using the Master Search to begin to
look for an ancestor allows you to search
across all record sets simultaneously.
Start by entering broad details such as
a name and birth date. If this returns too
many results then you can refine it by
looking within a record set like the census,
selecting a county and using keywords.
Case study
In the festive period many of us will be
thinking of buying gifts from shops,
the founders of whom may still be
immortalised in their store’s name even
today. For example, let us look for John
Lewis, a draper born in Shepton Mallet
in 1836 and who had moved to London
in his twenties to work as a silk buyer at
the Peter Robinson Department store at
Oxford Circus. To find the right John Lewis
we will do a person search and use the
keyword ‘Silk Mercer’. This immediately
locates him within the 1881 Census.
Click on the page icon to see the original
document, and press the save button
to add the record to an online family
tree that you can start to build using
TheGenealogist’s TreeView. The census
results page also features a house icon.
Clicking on this reveals a transcription
listing everyone present in the household.
If an ancestor was in business then
the very useful Trade,
Residential and Telephone
Directories can help us to
find addresses that our
ancestor occupied. In
1864 John Lewis opened
his own small drapery
shop, John Lewis & Co,
at 132 Cxford Street. This
original drapers’ shop is
now part of the same site
as the present-day John
Lewis department store
on Cxford Street. Lewis’s
business flourished and
expanded and was rebuilt
in the 1880s to form an all-
encompassing department
store. Destroyed in the
Blitz, the store was rebuilt
in the 1950s.
With a single click we
can see the entry on the
page of the Post Cffice
Directory and discover
that by 1 925 the store
occupied 278 to 288 Cxford Street W1
and 16 to 28 Holies Street, Cavendish
Square W1 .
Powerful search tools
TheGenealogist has a large number of
databases which can be searched either
using the Master Search or individually.
Some of the collections are in transcript
format and some are in printed book
format. From the main Search Page you
can use the Master Search to research
across all record sets. If you wish to
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search a specific record set, however, just
scroll down the Search page and you will
find all the record sets listed individually
on the right hand side.
TheGenealogist website, we have
seen, has a number of powerful features
that allow you to quickly start building
your family tree from scratch, while for
more seasoned researchers its unique
tools, such as the Master Search and
SmartSearch, can be used to home in on
elusive forebears, and will help to knock
down those brickwalls.
Voucher code
Use this special voucher code at www.TheGenealogist.co.uk/FT3FREE to claim your free 3-month Gold subscription to TheGenealogist
(worth £24.95): 894562. Offer ends 18 February 2016.
y-tree.co.uk
Christmas 2015 Familyriee 51
« •♦'jH
for under your tree!
REVIEWS
Karen Clare picks some Christmas reads
ristmas treats!
Research tricks & tips
My Family History by The Family
History Partnership
Get 201 6 off to a flying
start by making sure you
keep track of your research.
Independent publisher The
Family History Partnership’s
new 10-generation family
research record book with
pedigree charts should help
you do just that. The book
contains 21 handy A4 master
research record forms covering all the
main resources, including the index to the
General Register Office records of births,
marriages and deaths, parish register
and census search lists, FamilySearch
check sheets, and monumental inscription
and wills searches. Maternal entries are
featured at one end of the book, which can
be flipped over to give you paternal entries
at the other, and there is an Al-size pull-
out pedigree chart in the centre pages.
A CD containing all the record sheets on
pdf is included, so you can print off extras
whenever required. Perfect for handing
around at Christmas family gatherings!
• RRP £9.99 plus p&p from The
Family History Partnership (www.
thefamilyhistorypartnership.com) and
Family Tree’s Family History Bookshop at
familyhistorybookshop.co.uk.
Family First: Tracing Relationships in
the Past by Ruth Alexandra Symes
Familiarise yourself with the
social context of the times
in which your ancestors
lived and the relationships
they shared with regular
Family Tree contributor
Ruth Symes’s latest book.
^ ^ Covering 1800 to 1950,
^ I you can read up on such
gems as what a typical
fatherhood was like, how first names were
chosen for children, and commonly-held
ideas about wives and mothers. Not simply
a social history, this is also a practical
guide to tracing family relationships and
contemporary attitudes, looking behind
official and personal records to bring
the lives of our forebears into sharper
focus. Find out how you might identify an
ancestor’s missing father or godparents,
why (and how) your relative survived
multiple pregnancies, and whether your
ancestor’s position in the ‘family pecking
order’ was significant. There’s a rich seam
of knowledge and know-how to tap into
that should help you put flesh on the
bones of the names on your tree, and gain
a better understanding of your ancestors’
own relationships.
• ISBN: 9781473833883. RRP £19.99
hardback. Pen & Sword History.
World War
When the Office^
Went to War by
Clare Horrie and
Kathryn Phelps
Between August
1915 and August
1918 serving
members of the audit
office for the Great
Western Railway wrote hundreds of letters
back from the Front to their colleagues
and bosses at Paddington. Their letters
were arranged in carefully bound folders,
each acting as an office ‘newsletter’,
complete with a news section listing
those who had written or sent photos,
been injured, promoted or killed. It is the
newsletters reproduced in this volume
that give an unprecedented insight into
the war experiences of a close group of
colleagues, from all social classes, who
were writing to inform and entertain their
work mates back home, not just their loved
ones. Strong, jokey, formal and, of course,
brave voices emerge from the monthly
news summaries, but the undercurrents
reveal raw insight into the fragility of their
situations. The letters stopped abruptly
after the Armistice, so the brief biographies
provided at the end bring some closure to
their stories, brought so remarkably to life
by the power of the pen.
• ISBN: 9781844862801. RRP £14.99
hardback. Bloomsbury in association with
The National Archives.
I WAS A
SPY!
I was a Spy! by Marthe McKenna
A great little stocking
filler, this is ‘the
classic account of
behind-the-lines
espionage in the
First World War’,
with a foreword by
Winston Churchill
himself. The memoir,
first published in
1932, has been re-issued to mark the
centenary of WW1 and when McKenna
(nee Cnockaert, codename ‘Laura’) was
plucked from waitressing in her parents’
cafe in Belgium, to become a spy behind
German lines for British Intelligence.
Women can often be overlooked in war
history so it’s particularly wonderful to
see this tale of derring-do and survival
(McKenna was caught and faced the firing
squad in 1916 before her sentence was
commuted to life for her nursing service)
back in publication to thrill and inspire
newer generations.
• ISBN: 9781910860038. RRP £12.99
hardback. The Pool of London Press.
Vintage adverts
Try it! Buy it! by the British Library
Nowadays we’re well used to being ‘sold
to’, enticed to buy the latest gadget or
try the newest Nigella recipe, especially
at Christmas. Featuring more than
200 vintage adverts printed in fashion
magazines, newspapers on posters
and trade cards, drawn from the British
Library’s enviable collection, this colourful
little book tells us that commercialism is
nothing new. Containing
adverts from the early 1 9th
to 20th centuries, there’s
a big dose of nostalgia
too, for those with fond
childhood memories of
Bird’s Custard (‘makes
children sturdy!’ says a
1927 ad) or the ‘healthy’
52 Fami]y(tee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Shutterstock images: snowflakes © Sunny Studio;
teacup with books © Maglara; holly © All Vectors.
Marvel at tales of Henry VIN’s hospitality,
such as a 12ft fountain dispensing free
wine at the Field of the Cloth Gold in 1 520;
and wonder at the bizarre Sumptuary
Laws of 1 51 7, which set out the number
of courses different ranks were permitted
- nine for cardinals, but three or less for
those with no title but £40-£100 annual
income. We don’t suppose that rule would
go down so well on Christmas Day with the
rest of the family!
• ISBN: 9781445648743. RRP £20
hardback. Amberley Publishing.
• Subscribe to Family Tree? Enter our
competition to win these two books - see
page 45.
Servants’ Stories by Michelle Higgs
Forget the ‘Downton’
Christmas special,
below as
Michelle Higgs
(author of Tracing Your
Servant Ancestors ^
and A Visitor’s Guide
to Victorian Engiand)
explores the
of the domestic
servant between 1800-1950. With stories
sourced from oral histories, diaries,
autobiographies, letters, memoirs and
newspaper reports, the authentic voices
of individual servants shine through, while
the more general social history chapters
place their experiences in context. These
are the lesser-known ‘warts ‘n’ all’ stories
of ordinary folk in service in the smaller
homes of the middle classes, which is sure
to enhance understanding of your own
ancestors’ daily lives in domestic service.
• ISBN: 9781473822245. RRP £12.99
paperback. Pen & Sword History.
Memoirs
The Boy from Nowhere by Gregor
Fisher with Melanie Reid
Scottish actor Gregor Fisher is perhaps
best (and fondly) known to many as
comedy character Rab C Nesbitt, but you
might wonder why you would want to
read his life story. Well, this is no typical
‘celebrity’ autobiography but instead it is
a family history tale with twists and turns,
as Gregor’s past unravels and truths unfold
after decades in the dark. Growing up
just outside Glasgow in the 1950s, at 14
Gregor discovered he was
adopted. After a lifetime of
trying to trace his background,
he approached Times
columnist Melanie Reid in
2014 for help. What emerges
is a tragic, touching and funny
tale in which one of Scotland’s
national treasures finally finds
out who he is and where he
came from.
• ISBN: 9780008150433. RRP £18.99
hardback. HarperCollins.
Constance Street by Charlie
Indulge yourself in more memoir with the
story of one street in Silvertown, in the East
End of London, through the era of both
world wars. Featuring the true-life tales
of 12 working-class women, Constance
Street also tells of the Silvertown munitions
factory disaster of 1917, when the author’s
great-grandmother, Nellie Greenwood
(whose baby daughter survived being
thrown from her crib in the blast), opened
her laundry as a field hospital to tend the
injured, with the help of the women on the
street. Following his family’s story through
the Great War, roaring Twenties, the
Depression and the outbreak
of World War II, Charlie
Connelly vividly brings to life
the unbreakable bonds of
love, hardship and fortitude
that held this close-knit
community together.
• ISBN: 9780007528455.
RRP £7.99 paperback.
HarperCollins.
Coiistance |
Street
-rr
properties of Marmite (1929). Perhaps
your relative received one of the ‘latest’
military toys for the patriotic children of
World War I (a model Dreadnought or field
gun firing ‘quite harmless’ rubber shells,
1 91 5), or perhaps your ancestor was lucky
enough to have ‘The Vertical Feed Sewing
Machine, the latest American invention’ in
1883? This is an enjoyable pictorial romp
through print and social history that is
entertaining and informative, but not too
taxing on the brain after all that festive
indulgence.
• ISBN: 9780712357586. RRP £12.99
hardback. British Library.
Household histories
Get into the Christmas spirit with these
two new foodie titles from Amberley -
impress the in-laws at the dinner table...
Dining with the Victorians
by Emma Kay
Food was a significant
part of our Victorian
ancestors’ lives -
whether they ate gruel
in the workhouse,
boiled trotters on
the street or feasted
to excess (and felt
guilty about their
unhealthy moral values
afterwards), Emma
Kay’s Dining with the Victorians follows
deliciously on from her Dining with the
Georgians (2014), taking us on a culinary
tour of 19th-century life.
• ISBN: 9781445646541. RRP £18.99
hardback. Amberley Publishing.
V’IOTOTItIN*
The Tudor Kitchen
by Trevor Breverton
Terry Breverton ’s The Tudor Kitchen is
equally absorbing, from the extravagant to
the everyday recipes of the Tudor rich and
poor, gleaned from contemporary sources.
Noble households
could expect to feed
more than 1 00 people
over a meal time, with
a menu in one year
alone including 8,200
sheep, 2,330 deer and
53 wild boar, along with
countless birds such as
swan, heron and gull.
/ (iclor
I
I
f
www.family-tree.co.uk
Christmas 2015 Family'Itee 53
ANCESTORS ATYULETIDE
The spice
of life
Ruth A Symes takes a delicious look at the
history of the humble Christmas pudding
and its place of honour on our ancestors’
dinner tables.
Christmas pudding history
P lum pudding was very likely
to be found on the Christmas
tables of most of our families
throughout the 19th and
early 20th centuries. With its stodge
and fruit, it represented the warmth
and wholesomeness of British culinary
tradition. But, the secret to its huge
appeal probably lay in three of its
more unusual elements: its spices (a
nod to the perceived exoticism of
the British Empire), the likelihood
it contained alcohol (rum or brandy
were popular additions in non-
teetotal households) , and the silver
coins or charms that might have been
stirred into the mixture (guaranteed
to provide a happy diversion on
Christmas Day) .
Puddings for all classes
Even if times were hard, it seems, our
ancestors rarely missed out on their
pudding at Christmas time. Eamilies
scrimped and saved for ingredients
with one mid-Victorian newspaper
commenting that a poor woman might
be seen on Christmas Eve, ‘standing
outside a pawnbroker’s shop, with
three flat irons, an ancient engraving
hgurative of a harvest-home, and
her husband’s Sunday waistcoat, all
of which goods and chattels she is
prepared to make over to the usurer
by way of mortgage, that she may
obtain the needful purchase money
for the ingredients of her Christmas
pudding’. {The Falkirk Herald, 29
December 1853, quoting The Times of
the same week.)
Pudding even turned up on the
Christmas table of otherwise cheerless
institutions in the 19th century,
provoking the same journalist to quip
that, ‘we shut a man and his wife up
in the workhouse, carefully separating
them for twelve months, but on
Christmas Day, we give to each of
them a large wedge of plum pudding,
as a set off against the discomfort of
the year.’
Meanwhile, in private business
and on large estates, plum pudding
was the gift of choice by many
employers to their workforces.
The Nottingham Review and General
Advertiser oi 30 December 1831 was
typical in its commendation of a local
businessman: ‘William Brodhurst
Esq of Newark. . . [who] on Monday,
regaled the whole of his workmen
and their wives with plenty of roast
beef and plum pudding.’ And this
benevolent distribution of pudding
was exemplihed by Queen Victoria,
who always handed out pudding to
the tenants of her estate at Osborne
House on the Isle of Wight on
Christmas Eve: ‘The names of the
children were read out, each child
receiving a present, and there was
great fun as they bowed and curtseyed
very funnily, the schoolmaster keeping
each one back to see they did it
properly. They came by three times,
hrst for their presents, then for the
pieces of plum pudding and lastly for
the ornaments cut off the tree. Then
a few of the men and women off the
estate came by for plum pudding.’
(Tuesday 24 December 1867, Queen
Victoria’s journals.)
So popular was the Christmas
pudding that by the end of the
19th century the total amount of
ingredients used nationwide were
humorously calculated as follows:
‘We think that we are well within
the mark when we state that in this
country alone, 4,000,000 puddings
are prepared for Christmas day,
each of which will average 4 lbs in
weight. The national plum pudding.
Christmas 2015 Family’rree 55
ANCESTORS ATYULETIDE
An advert for Berwick’s Baking Powder showing Father Christmas
carrying a large Christmas pudding, c1900. The head of Father
Christmas is movable.
a new recipe, devised at short notice
by the Empire Marketing Board,
included minced apple from Canada,
demerara sugar from the West
Indies, eggs from the Irish Free State,
cinnamon from Ceylon, cloves from
Zanzibar and brandy from Cyprus!
therefore,
weighs just
about 7,589 tons;
to compose it you must take 2,628
tons of raisins, 892 tons of currants
and the same quantity of mixed peel,
of breadcrumbs and suet 1,339 tons
each, some 500,000 pints of brandy
and 32,000,000 eggs.’ {Edinburgh
Evening News, 14 December 1898.)
. & the military
In 1853, The Times reported
that ‘the soldiers and sailors
i of Queen Victoria eat their
Christmas pudding to a man;
' it is the necessary condition
of our national safety.’
And pudding - reassuring,
patriotic and sustaining -
continued to be associated
with the military throughout the
following century.
In the First World War, Christmas
For the empire...
By the last decade of the 19th
century, even if your ancestors
worked or served overseas, they
might still have enjoyed a traditional
Christmas pudding. As the epitome
of Britishness - and because they had
a long shelf-life - thousands of tins of
pudding were sent out to the colonies
of the empire, particularly India and
Australia, by relatives and friends.
In the late 1920s, there was
another twist to the idea of imperial
pudding. At a food exhibition at
Olympia in 1926, Princess Marie-
Louise came up with the idea of
making an imperial pudding using
ingredients from around the empire.
The first suggested recipe included
Canadian flour, Australian or South
African raisins, Australian sultanas,
Australian currants, English or
Scottish beef suet, Indian pudding
spice and Jamaican rum. So far so
good but, in fact, the recipe sparked
fury from those countries, such as
New Zealand, which had either not
been represented at all or which had,
like India, been underrepresented in
terms of ingredients. To rectify this.
For rich and poor:
‘Members of the
United Cooks’ Society
preparing a monster plum
pudding at Marylebone
Workhouse for the
Lancashire operatives’ in
this 1 863 illustration from
The Illustrated London
News.
Some Christmas
pudding recipes from
Mrs Beeton’s Book of
Household Management.
56 Famiiyriee Christmas 2015
pudding was an important constituent
in Christmas parcels sent to the troops
since its associations with home were
considered to boost morale. Up and
down the country, local newspapers
organised campaigns to send tinned
pudding to troops that had been
recruited from their area. In some
cases, these wartime plum puddings
might even provide an unusual way
back into Ending your ancestors. This
is because when individual soldiers
wrote in thanks for their puddings,
their letters sometimes appeared
in local newspapers. A letter to The
Burton Daily Mail of 21 February 1917
from GR Ford, Shoeing Smith, Royal
Field Artillery of 93 Waterloo Street,
Burton, for example, sums up his
delight with his gift: T now take the
pleasure of acknowledging receipt
of your most welcome Christmas
pudding, which I was so pleased to
receive. I and my friends enjoyed the
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Burton Daily Mail 21 February 1917
Page 4 • of 4 Article, CHRISTMAS PUDDINGS.
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Letters of thanks in February
1 91 7 by soldiers who
had received Christmas
puddings from readers
of the Burton Daily Mail,
available in the British
newspapers collection at
Findmypast.co.uk.
Below: The Liverpool Daily
Post of 26 December 1 864
detailed the ingredients -
including 240 eggs - for the
Christmas pudding to be
enjoyed ‘without limitation’
by the 660 inmates of West
Derby Workhouse.
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pudding so much.’
The stirring of the
Christmas pudding
continued to be a
much celebrated
ritual on all HMS
ships and at Naval
establishments long
after the end of
both world wars. In
1952, with rationing
still uppermost in
the minds of many,
the ‘mammoth’
puddings made
at HMS Condor,
at Arbroath in
Scotland, attracted
particular attention
in the press. Weighing in at 401b
in total and using 130 eggs, these
puddings also included 160 specially
sterilised silver three-penny bits,
rather than coins made from
cupro-nickel (which when mixed
with fruit were deemed to produce
an unpleasant taste). Sailors who
served at the station received an
8oz portion of pudding, and the
names of those few chosen to stir the
enormous barrels of mixture with
‘carley raft paddles’, appeared in local
newspapers.
A recipe in flux
It’s fun to imagine that - on some
sensory and emotional level - you
will in some way be ‘connecting’ with
your ancestors when you taste your
pudding this Christmas. But recipes
for plum puddings have suffered
some variation over the decades and
have certainly not tasted (nor indeed
fwid my QLJranyi er MfT9^!Qr4i Wpwi
Liverpool Daily Post 26 December 1S64
ora AFik^l?: CHHlSTMASf£f:nviTie!?
- WKSrr BBRBT WOHZaorSE
Ip % Dl tbtf imbf
in rTtimben will tw «7Tait •tid
on II IJliunl s-eate bnte laad# kj
*nrl Mr T. GondD Urt.
Ti» ^|tli
W»4llii mnJ tarlitidi of
lUi% Jidaft c.jw tuii tWt.k U a J^iiu
i Qt ObtvimiA ^ror^jH f*rt dinner ibm
I »ai hu rrurf hn’f tivJ pltitn v Iniiittinn. i
m Pint of rtJf^ ^ifh afiM wUl ftii 0ttti<SM flf
. iit l ui of iV lliii uMoiubi# ‘
Twt m to U liMj tai. af M,
of ifiQr fJitfiirktiju piiiliiftflc
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bOlnm, 340 1 (H)*, Slim, ui
Mnlr*^ iZi 1431^ wUl b« <rl tnnf!
looked) the same for each generation
of our ancestors.
The common adulteration of flour
in the 1860s, for example, meant
that some mid-Victorian puddings
were pretty tasteless. And other
intermittent historical factors also
affected the composition of puddings.
In 1922, a disaster abroad caused
the following startling headline to
appear in many British newspapers:
‘CHRISTMAS PUDDING MAY HAVE
TO BE MADE WITHOUT RAISINS!’
The source of the problem was a
huge hre that had devastated the
commercial centre of the port town
of Smyrna (located in present-day
Turkey), ruining the entire 80,000-
100,000 tonnes of raisins for export.
Mr McVittie, honorary secretary of the
British Chamber of Commerce in the
town, commented: ‘English Christmas
puddings will have to be made without
raisins this year, unless people can
afford to pay fabulous prices for them.
Christmas pudding history
Read up on it
• Christmas: A Social History by Mark
Connelly (IB Tauris, reprint, 2012);
• The History of Christmas Food and
Feast by Claire Hopley (Remember
When, 2009);
• All Things Christmas: The History and
Traditions of Advent and Christmas by
EG Lewis (CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform, 2012);
• Christmas Customs and Traditions:
Their History and Significance by
Clement A Miles (Dover Publications,
1976);
• The King’s Christmas Pudding:
Globalization, Recipes, and the
Commodities of Empire by Kaori
O’Connor (Journal of Global History,
Vol 4, 2009, PP127-155).
A result of the hre was a rise today in
the price of currants from Greece.’
{Portsmouth Evening News, 16 September
1922.)
In the years of the Second World
War, few Christmas puddings were
made at home because of rationing.
Keen to keep up the tradition and
for it not to become a treat only for
the very rich. The Ministry of Eood,
with the voluntary agreement of
food manufacturers, introduced
standardisation of sizes and prices for
Christmas puddings within and without
basins. In 1943, the prices of these
standardised puddings ranged from 1
shilling 7V^d for 21b puddings without
basins to 7 shillings for 41b puddings
in basins (reported in The Gloucester
Citizen, 15 December 1942).
The making of the annual Christmas
pudding might have tested the
ingenuity and stretched the resources
of our ancestors over the years but
it was a part of the festivities that
they would rarely have done without,
for after all, as The Times put it on
29 December 1853, ‘This savoury
compound. . . is the very foundation of
Anglo-Saxon civilization’.
Zifjout {fte aiifftor
Ruth A Symes is the author
of Family First: Tracing
Relationships in the Past, which
has just been published by
Pen & Sword History.
www.family-tree.co.uk
Christmas 2015 Familyqree 57
^ f f MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY
William the Conqueror is regarded as the founding ancestor of the British royal family - though of course ancestral royal lines
go back much further. On the Bayeaux Tapestry (England, 11th century), William is depicted between his half brothers Odo
(left) and Robert (right).
The backbone
of genealogy
Of all the family trees in the world, one of the best known, best researched,
best proven is that of our own royal family. Anthony Adolph delves deeply
into royal genealogy.
58 Family4tee Christmas 2015
w ww.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
Images: Genealogical roll and Matilda © The British Library Board; Richard III cortege,
courtesy of Anthony Adolph; George III, and Elizabeth I © the Wellcome Library,
London under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creative-
commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Tracing royal family trees
U nlike most other family
trees, which have been
traced back retrospectively
using historical records,
the British royal family’s pedigree has
been a matter of constant fact ever
since William’s arrival at Hastings
in 1066. He and his wife Matilda
already had a son, the ill-fated
William Rufus, and within two years
of their arrival the future Henry I
was born, so the identity of his sons
was a matter of common knowledge.
In other societies and at other times,
this contemporary general knowledge
of who was who may eventually have
been lost, or become garbled (Henry
I succeeded William Rufus, so later
genealogies may have assumed
he was his son, not his younger
brother). But the Normans were
an obsessively bureaucratic race.
The chief means of record-keeping
were chronicles, compiled for the
most part by monks: no less than
nine chronicles, including those of
Ordericus Vitalis and William of
Malmesbury, date from the reigns of
the first two Williams. From Henry
Fs reign we have three, including
Henry of Huntingdon’s, and the habit
continued throughout the Middle
Ages during which period royal
family trees were also drawn, both to
compliment rulers and to intimidate
their enemies. Following the style
developed by Giovanni Boccaccio
(died 1375), each ruler’s face was
shown in a circle, connected by one
line to his father and, by a series of
radiating lines, to his sons, a style that
so resembled the imprint of a crane’s
foot in mud that such diagrams were
termed pied de gru, ‘crane’s foot’
charts - hence the term ‘pedigree’.
All sorts of records
Elsewhere, all such wonderful
records may have been lost, but
despite all our civil wars, fires, rats,
and damp, enough of these records
have remained safe to preserve this
collective knowledge of the royal
pedigree. Thus we know in intense
detail about the succession dispute
between Henry Ts daughter Matilda
and his sister Adela’s son Stephen of
Blois and how eventually Matilda’s son
Henry Plantagenet became Henry II.
The succession of Plantagenet kings is
well-chronicled, including the death
Henry I of
England being
enthroned,
from the
illuminated
Chronica
Majors by
Matthew Paris
(1236-1259)
British Library
MS Cotton
Claudius
D Vi, f9.
of Henry’s childless son Richard I and
the succession of Richard’s brother
John, the ancestor of all those who
came after - Henry III, then three
Edwards. The complex machinations
and claims to the throne of Edward
Ill’s descendants during the Wars of
the Roses are known in detail, as is
the conclusion, when Henry Tudor
defeated his cousin Richard III at
Bosworth in 1485, became Henry VII,
and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Richard’s late brother Edward IV.
From Tudor times onwards, the
volume of material recording the
births, marriages, deaths, successions
and coronations of the royal family
has only increased. We can follow the
succession down from Henry VII to
his son Henry VIII with his six wives
and three childless children, Edward
VI, Mary and Elizabeth, and we
know in detail how the throne then
passed to Elizabeth’s nearest cousin
James VI Stuart of Scotland, whose
great-grandmother was Henry VII’s
daughter Margaret, and who became
James I of England.
Then comes that most troubled
period, chronicled in minute detail
by the records of Parliament and
numerous independent diaries and
letters, when James’s son Charles
I quarrelled with Parliament and
lost his head, but his son Charles
II was restored in 1660. He died
without legitimate heirs, leaving
a Catholic brother, James II, who
was overthrown in the Glorious
Revolution in 1688, with the throne
going to James’s Protestant daughter
Mary and her Dutch husband (also
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 FamiyCree 59
MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY
first cousin) William of Orange. They
died childless, so the throne passed
hrst to Mary’s sister Anne, who also
died childless. The nearest heirs,
the descendants of Charles ITs sister
Henrietta Anne, were Catholics, so
Parliament ruled that the throne must
pass instead to the closest Protestant
heir, which happened to be George
of Hanover, grandson of James Ts
daughter Elizabeth; he became
George I. Three Georges later, George
IV died without legitimate offspring,
as did his brother William IV (though
David Cameron descends from one of
William’s illegitimate offspring), so the
throne went to their niece Victoria,
whose son Edward VII was the father
of George V. His son George VI was
the father of our own queen.
Collateral lines
This not-entirely undisputed line
of succession leads to lots of other
genealogical lines with some claim
or other to be the ‘rightful’ rulers
of Britain, had things turned out
differently. The Duke of Beaufort has
an unbroken genealogical male-line
descent from Edward Ill’s son John of
Gaunt, and through female-lines there
are innumerable descendants of the
Plantagenet kings - myself included
- many of us being more senior in
strict terms of succession than the
descendants of Elizabeth Plantagenet
and Henry Tudor (only our ancestor
didn’t win the Battle of Bosworth,
so any claims we might care to make
to the throne would be entirely
hypothetical). The settlement of 1688
resulted in a bristling family tree of
Erench and German descendants of
Henrietta Anne Stuart, who would
be kings now had their ancestors not
been Catholics: Eranz, Duke of Bavaria
is the senior heir of this line but, like
the Duke of Beaufort, he makes no
comment on his purely theoretical
claim to the throne. James ITs exiled
descendants died out, but despite that
various characters have claimed to be
his heirs: the recent claims of Count
Pininski to a direct descent from James
II were challenged robustly by Marie-
Louise Backhurst in 2013 in The
Society of Genealogists’ Genealogists’
Magazine (vol 31, no 2, 45-49).
Earlier ancestors
Beyond the central, certain stem of
the royal family tree, the genealogy
of the royals becomes less certain and
more open to interpretation. Still,
the main lines back are generally well
Genealogical roll of the kings of England.
(British Library, K90048-11 Royal 14 B.VI,
membrane 5 Shelfmark Royal 14 B VI.)
A close up of one of the rolls.
recorded. Thanks to the Normans’
own chronicles, we know William the
Conqueror’s male-line back to his 3x
great-grandfather Hrolf, the Viking
founder of Normandy. The Anglo-
Saxon genealogies were recorded in
detail in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
and Nennius’s Historia Brittonum, and
the Royal Eamily gained a descent
from them when Henry I married
V.
V’ I
- V’, J
I. ^
J
60 Famiyitee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Tracing royal family trees
Matilda of Scotland, whose mother St
Margaret was the granddaughter of
the English king Edmund II Ironside.
Medieval Scots chronicles record the
Stuarts’ descent from the earlier kings
of Scotland in detail too.
Ireland and Wales became part
of Great Britain by conquest, not
by succession, so the genealogies
of their rulers were not integral
components of the royal family tree,
but the original Kings of Scots were
descended from the earlier Irish
High Kings, and over the centuries
descendants of the Welsh kings
have married into the royal line too.
Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror.
(British Library D VII 067630 Cotton Nero
D VII, f7. Golden Book of St Albans.)
The funeral cortege of Richard III making
its way through Leicester on 22 March
201 5, seen from where Anthony was
standing with a crew from Channel
4, among the excited crowds. The
rediscovery of Richard’s bones, their
identification by finding a female-line
genetic match with a known female-
line descendant of his sister’s, and
his subsequent reburial in Leicester
Cathedral attracted worldwide media
attention and stimulated a renewed
fascination in the convoluted family tree
of the Wars of the Roses.
Henry Tudor’s claim to royal Welsh
ancestry was mere bluster, rubber-
stamped by genealogists fearful of
the consequences if they did not
but, earlier on, Llewellyn the Great
(died 1240) married four of his
daughters to powerful English lords,
including Ralph Mortimer, hoping
thus to secure the borders of his
beleaguered Welsh realm. Llewellyn’s
plan failed, but his blood coursed
through his English descendants,
particularly down the Mortimer
line: his descendant Anne Mortimer
was the mother of Richard, Duke
of York, whose sons were Richard
III and Edward IV. Llewellyn’s royal
Welsh ancestry was impeccably
recorded in genealogical manuscripts
(all conveniently collated in Peter
Bartrum’s 1966 Early Welsh Genealogical
Tracts). His line goes back to Welsh
kings who claimed descent from the
wledigs, the warlords who tried to
keep the peace after the collapse of
the Roman Empire, and several of
them in turn claimed descent from
Cassivellaunus, the native British king
who had led the hrst resistance to I
Christmas 2015 FamilyTree 61
MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY
T
the Genealogy of Salvation, which
linked our British ancestors back to
the Bible and thus to the core of their
religious beliefs.
Tracing the earlier real ancestors
of the Plantagenets and the royal
family’s other noble French forebears,
meanwhile, is the subject of ongoing
research by prosopographists, most
notably Christian Settipani, who try to
piece together ever earlier generations
using whatever original records
have survived from the Dark Ages.
Through female-lines, the royal family
also has numerous descents from
foreign royal dynasties, whose own
earlier descents, as mapped by the late
Sir Anthony Wagner (in Pedigree and
Progress, 1975), is the ongoing work of
Don Stone (www.donstonetech.com).
Needless to say, the internet is awash
with false and unproven connections,
so recourse to reliable
sources is essential.
Aside from their
extremely well-
documented royal lines,
the modern royals have
many non-royal lines of ancestry.
The titled male-line ancestries of
the Queen Mother and Princess
Diana were already recorded in
Burke’s Peerage hut, like almost the
entire ancestry of the Duchess of
Cambridge, they had non-noble lines
that needed tracing just like everyone
else’s, and of course they share those
non-royal ancestors with many other
people. My own contribution was
proving the Duchess of Cambridge’s
descent from the landed gentry
Fairfaxes of Yorkshire, as detailed
at anthonyadolph.co.uk/princess-
catherine.
Crooked lines
At every generation of the royal family
tree the possibilities for illegitimacy
and subterfuge were legion. Chris
Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis’s The
Royal Bastards of Medieval England
(1984) and Peter Beauclerk-Dewar
and Roger Powell’s Right Royal
Bastards: The Fruits of Passion (2006)
present the evidence for illegitimate
offspring (some children were openly
Caesar. Cassivellaunus, said the Welsh
bards, was descended from Brutus of
Troy, who was said to have come to
Britain, killed the giants who lived
here and founded London as the
new Troy in the west, as recounted in
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s imaginative
History of the Kings of Britain. Brutus
was imagined as the great-grandson
of Aeneas of Troy, the hero of Virgil’s
Aeneid, who was in turn the son
of Anchises and the love-goddess
Aphrodite, while Anchises could be
traced back through the Trojan kings
(as detailed in Homer’s Iliad) to the
progeny (according to Nennius) of
Noah, descendant of Adam and Eve.
These colourful early links owed
much to monkish imagining, but
they are intensely revealing of the
Dark Age mind-sets from which they
emerged and were necessary links in
Richard III and the future Henry VII at
the Battle of Bosworth in 1 485, from an
engraving made in 1 857.
The tomb effigies of Henry II and Eleanor
of Aquitaine in the abbey of Fontevraud,
France. Henry’s father’s family were
Counts of Anjou and thus the English
kings retained vast estates in France
throughout the Middle Ages.
62
Mtee Christmas 2015
w ww.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
Tracing royal family trees
acknowledged, and for others there is
persuasive circumstantial evidence).
Even with legitimate lines, ‘facts’ can
be questioned. In my book The King’s
Henchman (2012) I argued that the
closeness of Queen Henrietta Maria
to her conhdant Henryjermyn could
mean that he, and not her husband
Charles I, was the real father of
Charles II. Genetic tests on Richard
Ill’s bones should have showed him
to be an exact male-line match of the
present Duke of Beaufort, but they
didn’t. The press instantly assumed
that the genetic break had taken
place in the immediate male-line
ancestry of Richard III, so branded
the whole modern royal family (who
are descended from Richard’s sister)
‘illegitimate’, but the break is far
likelier to have taken place in the line
leading down to the present duke,
spoiling his claim of an unbroken
male-line back to the Plantagenets,
but leaving the royal family’s ancestry
unaffected. A more serious issue is
the fact that, although Queen Victoria
passed haemophilia down to some of
her descendants, none of her apparent
ancestors suffered from it, suggesting
that her real father may have been
someone other than her mother’s
husband, the Duke of Kent - unless
her carrying of haemophilia was due
to a freak mutation at her conception.
But despite the uncertainties raised
by scholarly probings, the royal
family’s ancestry remains one of the
best-recorded in the world. In all
cases, two facts remain paramount:
a child born to married parents
is their legal offspring regardless
of biological niceties, and once a
monarch is crowned as the successor
to the last, that succession does not
become invalidated by subsequent
scholarly discoveries about the
previous monarch’s antecedents: we
genealogists can speculate all we like
about details in the royal family tree.
but the Queen’s right to the throne,
in succession to her father, remains,
legally as well as morally, unaltered.
If you can trace any of your lines
back to the upper classes, you may
well hnd a line that snakes back
through the younger children of
dukes to ancestors descended, one
way or another, from royalty. Any of us
who can prove a legitimate line back
has a place in the line of succession:
actually, if it were possible for everyone
in Britain to trace every single
ancestor over the last thousand years
then we’d probably all fmd descents
from William the Conqueror and
thus know our place in the royal line
of succession. The royal family tree is
not just an aide to classroom history
teaching. It is, one way or another,
the backbone of all of British
genealogy.
Antnony Aaoipn is a proressionai
genealogist (www.anthonyadolph.
co.uk) and author of books including
Tracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors
and Brutus of Troy and the Quest
for the Ancestry of the British. His
latest book in Search of Our Ancient
Ancestors: From the Big Bang to
Modern Britain, in Science and Myth is
published by Pen and Sword.
www.family-tree.co.uk
Christmas 2015 Family’rree 63
t TRACING BLUE-BLOODED ANCESTORS
1
How far are
you related to
royalty?
When faced with a family rumour that we’re
descended from royalty, maybe we should not be
so quick to pooh-pooh it. Richard Morgan weighs
up the odds of finding that blue blood.
T he number of our
ancestors doubles at each
generation, so we all have
two parents and most of
us have four grandparents, eight
great-grandparents, etc. A quick
calculation suggests that going back
to about the year 1500 (ie some 15
generations back) each of us might
have had some 32,768 ancestors. Yet
the population studies of that time
estimate there were between 2 and
3 million - perhaps 2.25 million -
people in England and Wales, and
about 750,000 in each of Scotland and
Ireland - say 3,750,000 for the whole
of the British Isles, though estimates
do vary. This roughly suggests,
however, that most of us might each
be descended from approximately
one per cent of everyone alive in 1500.
Can this really be so?
Two factors are needed to correct
this view. First, for those of us with
immigrant ancestors - such as
Huguenots from France in the 1700s,
Germans in the 19th century, Jewish,
or Commonwealth ancestors - some
or even all of these ancestors would
have been abroad.
The other factor that reduces the
score substantially is the marriage
of cousins. A marriage between
first cousins reduces the number of
their children’s great-grandparents
from eight to six, with proportionate
diminution of all ancestors going back.
It has to be the case that for families
domiciled in the UK over many
centuries, there are likely to have been
several marriages of cousins over the
years. It must also be expected that a
good many of the potential partners
would always be relatives in the same
or a neighbouring village.
The most extreme case of marriages
of cousins in successive generations
that I know of is in the ancestry of
Carlos II of Spain. Philip I and his
queen Joan The Mad’ of Spain occur
eight separate times in Carlos’s
ancestry.
It must be the case that, except
for recent immigrants, all of us are
related to each other if you go back far
enough, and of course DNA analysis
throws up many common ancestors
- even if the connection is not always
traceable.
As it happens an eccentric
genealogist born Melville Amadeus
Henry Douglas Heddle de la
Caillemotte de Massue de Ruvigny,
but calling himself the Marquis de
Ruvigny, made an attempt to quantify
one particular line of ancient English
ancestors up to the beginning of the
20th century. Ruvigny himself was
born in England and his father’s claim
to be a French marquis was to say the
least problematical. He was apparently
of Irish descent though the family had
lived in France for a while.
Ruvigny published several books
on genealogy. These days he is best
known for his hve volumes of The Roll
of Honour, which aimed to provide
biographies of all those killed in
the First World War. He completed
only 26,768 biographies, but they are
available on Ancestry, Findmypast,
TheGenealogist and GenesReunited.
However, arguably Ruvigny ’s most
important work was The Plantagenet
Roll of the Blood Royal, issued in
hve large volumes in I903-I9II.
Its purpose was to list everyone
who might be descended from the
Plantagenet and Tudor kings of
England, as well as the kings of
Scotland. Ruvigny was an ardent
Jacobite who refused to recognise the
accession of the Hanoverians in 1714,
so this gave him an excuse to ignore
the relatively few descents from more
recent monarchs. Each volume takes
a different ‘gateway’ ancestor and lists
their descendants.
Ruvigny ’s hrst ‘Tudor’ volume
published in 1903 described the
descents from Edward IV and Henry
VII of England, and James III of
Scotland, endeavouring to list every
single person he could hnd who
could claim the relevant descent. The
volume contains some 133 family
trees, followed by lists of people then
alive or only very recently dead in
order of primogeniture - that is to say,
the order in which each such person
might accede to the throne in the
64 Family fee Christmas 2015
\
www.family-tree.co.uk
Image: marbled paper by Walters Art Illuminated Medieval Manuscript published
under the Creative Commons 2.0 Generic licence. Portrait of Richard Morgan by
Anastasia Pollarrd RP.
Kings, queens & family trees
THE
PLANTAGENET
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Find part 1 of De Ruvigny’s The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal on Archive.org.
unlikely event of a total extinction of
the present royal family and all others
having a better title to the crown.
This arrangement conveniently put
the Jacobite pretenders at the head of
the list well ahead of Queen Victoria
and Edward VII. The volume takes
565 pages to deal with nearly 12,000
possible descendants and there is also
a detailed index.
This was followed by four volumes
dealing with some of the descendants
of Edward III:
• 18,000 descendants from George
Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward
IV, published 1905,
• 25,500 descendants from their sister
Anne Duchess of Exeter, published
1906,
• 18,000 descendants from Isabel
Countess of Essex and Eu who
was aunt of the Duke of Clarence,
published 1908, and
• 30,000 descendants from Lady
Elizabeth Mortimer wife of Harry
Hotspur - she was great-aunt of the
Lady Essex 1911. This last volume is
labelled ominously Part I. (No Part II
was ever published though the Society
of Genealogists has a typescript which
appears to be the hrst 190 pages of
Part II.)
It will be seen that each volume
starts further back. Apart from
finishing off the Mortimer-Percy
line, there still remain several other
branches that were never tackled,
such as the numerous descendants
of Edward Ill’s sons John Duke of
Lancaster and Edmund Duke of York
and their less well-known siblings
Thomas of Woodstock and Isabel
Countess of Bedford. At hrst glance
this looks like four or hve more
volumes, but intermarriage with
cousins means that many of these
people have already been dealt with
in previous volumes. Even so, Ruvigny
estimated the descendants of Edward
III at 300,000.
It is to be noted that there are many
descendants of British royalty who are
entirely missed in Ruvigny’s system
either because their royal ancestor was
much more recent than any he wrote
about, or by reason of illegitimacy,
or both (I am thinking here of the
children of Charles II and William
IV). There are also people descended
from much earlier monarchs. Eor I
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 Family:' ree 65
f TRACING BLUE-BLOODED ANCESTORS
T
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example, Edward I had two daughters,
Joan and Elizabeth, who married
Englishmen: the Earl of Gloucester
and the Earl of Hereford respectively,
and it seems their progeny survive.
You might think that such
descendants would be conhned to
the aristocracy. Some of course
were, but there are still a surprising
number who are ordinary people with
no pretensions to any kind of wealth
or title. Sir Anthony Wagner in his
famous book, English Genealogy, shows
a fascinating pedigree of a Salisbury
innkeeper called Eerdinando
jjlFind out more
• Search part of De Ruvigny’s work
on the Plantagenet royal blood line
at search.ancestry.co.uk/search/
db.aspx?dbid=6552.
• Printed copies of all five volumes
of De Ruvigny’s The Plantagenet Roll
of the Blood Royal are available from
Genealogical.com.
V y
Bainton, who was living in 1623. His
grandfather. Sir William Cavendish,
was the ancestor of four dukedoms
- those of Devonshire, Newcastle,
Portland and Kingston (hve if you
include the Dukedom of Norfolk
through the female line) - and also
father of James Fs aunt Elizabeth
Cavendish. This neatly illustrates the
comparative social mobility of early
17th century England.
By the 20th century the decline
and fall of many families has become
commonplace. My grandfather,
John William Brooks, who was a
mere commercial traveller selling
household polish in Ramsgate,
nevertheless has his place in Ruvigny
as descendant on claim no 7,440 -
which means that he had only to get
rid of 7,439 people with a better claim
and he would have become King John
II. The population of Britain in 1903
when Ruvigny wrote was about half
what it is today. Some of the increase
since then is from immigration, but
much is not.
If Ruvigny is right that Edward III
Descendants of Edward III and Philippa of
Hainault, as outlined by De Ruvigny.
had some 300,000 descendants alive in
1911, then there are probably at least
half a million descendants alive today,
and perhaps more. If we widen the
scope to all the other monarchs that
Ruvigny did not deal with, I suspect
the hgure comes to at least 600,000
people.
I am prepared to bet several of them
are readers of Family Tree. Do let us
know if you are! V*^
^hovtf the auffior^
Richard Morgan is editor of two
diaries, The Diary of a Bedfordshire
Squire (Beds Historical Record
Society, vol 66, 1987) and The Diary of
an indian Cavairy Officer (Pagoda Tree
Press, 2003), and also Life Runneth
as the Brooks - the Brooks famiiy in
Bedfordshire (Pagoda Tree Press,
2011) and British Ships in indian Waters
(www.fibis.org, 2012).
He has written several articles on Indian
and other history, and is also the author of
books on IT Law.
Image: © Dmitry Remesov/Shutterstock.
Treat your loved ones to the perfeot gift this
Christmas with a subscription to Family Tree.
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Christmas 2015 Family 67
stumbling upon a 19th-
century report of a troubled
musician’s untimely death at
a popular tourist spot, Anna
Maria Barry feit impeiled to
delve further into newspapers
to trace his forgotten story. In
doing so, she also gained a
vivid insight into life and death
in Victorian London...
The Duke of York Column
in Waterloo Place, off The
Mall, where Henri Stephan
plunged to his death in
1850 .
A t approximately 10.15am
on 14 May 1850, a French
man named Henri Stephan
wandered up to the Duke
of York Column, situated between St'
James’ Park and The Mall. Stephan
was a musician, employed as a horn
player at London’s Italian Opera^
House (Her Majesty’s Theatre).
He greeted the uncomprehending
attendant in French, before paying
the 6d entrance fee and climbing the"
stairs to the top. From the summit
he admired far-reaching views of the
Victorian metropolis, circling the
viewing platform several times. After
15 minutes he climbed over the iron
railings and threw himself 280ft to his
death.
The value of newspapers
One of the great pleasures of
researching the 19th century is
working with newspapers. Many
of these are available online, in
searchable databases containing
hundreds of papers and periodicals
from all corners of the country. A
glance over any publication from
this period will offer a fascinating
glimpse into 19th-century life. News
reports, portraits of celebrities,
reviews of entertainments, adverts
for new inventions: they bring the
Victorian city vividly to life. In fact,
when working with these sources, it is
very easy to get side-tracked by some
tantalising story in faded print. It was
in exactly this way that I hrst stumbled
upon the sad story of Henri Stephan. ^
I am writing a PhD on 19th-century 5
opera singers, and was searching
a newspaper database for reports
from London’s Italian Opera House.
Instead, I came across the sad story
of Stephan’s suicide, which was easily
as dramatic as anything to be found
on the operatic stage. Becoming ^
intrigued, I pursued his story through
the pages of various newspapers
Through reports on his suicide and
the resulting inquest, I was able to
discover more about Stephan’s life and
the sad circumstances of his death.
His forgotten story offers a fascinating
insight into life and death in Victorian
London, while also demonstrating
how researchers might make use of
digitised 19th-century news sources.
Databases of 19th-century
newspapers and periodicals are
now widely available through public
libraries. Those with a subscription
to Findmypast.co.uk or the
British Newspaper Archive (www.
britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk)
can also access a growing number of
newspapers from the British Library’s
newspaper collection online. These
databases offer sophisticated search
functions, allowing you to search
by keyword and within specihed
date ranges. It is even possible to
search newspapers from particular
geographic areas, which is especially
useful if you are looking for reports
in the regional press. Using these
databases I was able to search Henri
68 Family Christmas 2015
imily-tree.co.uk
Stephan’s name in newspapers from
1850. Instantly, I was presented with
dozens of reports on his death.
Crucial details
In Victorian Britain, newspapers
served as a form of entertainment
as well as a source of news. In an
age before photography, colourful
and descriptive language was often
employed to bring reports vividly
to life. Gory details of murders and
suicides sold newspapers. Judith
Flanders describes this sort of
reporting in her excellent book The
Invention of Murder (HarperPress,
2011). Reports of Stephan’s suicide
consequently include a level of detail
that is surprising and even distasteful
to a 21st-century reader. In a typical
report. The Standard described
Stephan’s death: ‘The doors [of the
monument] had scarcely been opened
Life & death in Victorian London
Benjamin Lumley ran Her Majesty’s
Theatre, where Stephan was a horn player.
This portrait appears in Lumley’s book
of memoirs, Reminiscences of the Opera
(1864, digitised at archive.org).
more than 10 minutes, when a stout,
well-dressed gentleman, apparently
between 48 and 50 years of age,
paid his admission fee, at the same
time addressing the parties in a few
words of a foreign language, but as
the porter was not acquainted with
that language, he passed on without
further observation. The top of the
column is surrounded by a square iron
railing, at a height from the base of
about 260 or 280 feet. Here, according
to custom, was an attendant, placed
there by the authorities, for the double
purpose of giving information as to
the neighbouring objects of attraction,
and with a view of preventing such
circumstance as this morning has
unfortunately taken place. It appears
that the unfortunate gentleman
seemed to be much delighted with
the distant scenery - so much so as
completely to throw the ordinary
attendant off his guard. After the
deceased had been at the top for 15 or
20 minutes, he suddenly, by a violent
effort, threw himself over the railing
at the south-east corner, the toe of
one of his boots slightly touching the
iron work. He fell upon the granite
pavement with a most fearful crash,
falling directly upon his head, and
of course producing instantaneous
death. His body was horribly bruised
in every part, his legs, arms, and
several ribs being broken, his brains
scattered on the ground, and the
blood tinging not only the pavement,
but even some portions of the
basement of the column. His bones in
two or three places protruded through
his clothing.’
Other newspapers featured similar
accounts, all of which revealed that
Stephan was identihed by a contract
found in his pocket. The Standard
recounted: ‘When his pockets were
searched, the only thing found by
police was a small white handkerchief
marked at one corner HS, a small
purse containing Is 6d in silver; and
the copy of an agreement entered into
between himself and Mr Lumley, of
the Italian Opera House.’
Lid lifts on a life
Benjamin Lumley was the well-
known impresario who ran the opera
company at Her Majesty’s Theatre.
Stephan had been employed in the ^
Christmas 2015 Family’rree 69
An engraving of the Duke
of York Column by J Woods
after a picture by J Salmon,
published in 1837, 13 years
before Stephan’s suicide.
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
IN THE NEWS
Reader
story
orchestra as a horn player, and his
contract revealed that his salary
was £3 6s a week. The National
Archives’ website offers a currency
converter (www.nationalarchives.
gov.uk/currency), which translates
historical values to their equivalent
worth in 2005’s prices. This tool
reveals that Stephan’s salary was
roughly equivalent to £193.15 a week.
Intrigued by these reports, I was keen
to discover more. What sort of man
was Stephan, and what drove him to
such a desperate end?
A lively inquest
Newspaper reports from two days
later reveal far more information
about Stephan’s life and death. On
16 May an inquest into his suicide
was held at St Martin’s Workhouse,
before a jury of 13. The workhouse,
where Stephan’s remains had been
taken, stood on the site now occupied
by The National Gallery, adjacent to
Trafalgar Square. In Victorian Britain
an inquest was held when a death
was suspicious. These inquests were
something of a spectacle, attracting
crowds eager to hear the gory details
hrst hand. This was no different
in Stephan’s case; his inquest was
crowded with Londoners anxious to
hear the full facts.
Several people gave evidence at
Stephan’s inquest and their accounts
were relayed in detailed newspaper
reports. Witnesses included the
keeper of the column and members
of the public who had witnessed
Stephan’s behaviour on that fateful
morning. One Mr Henry Hutton
described seeing Stephan deliberately
put his leg over the railings,
suggesting his fall was not accidental.
A surgeon described the injuries
to Stephan’s body in great detail.
Remarkably, despite extensive trauma,
his skull had remained intact. Most
crucial, however, was evidence from
Stephan’s brother-in-law, an Emile
Petit. Stephan had lived with Petit,
who was a ballet master also in the
employ of Lumley at Her Majesty’s
Theatre. His evidence revealed that
Stephan had recently been troubled.
The Morning Chronicle recounted:
‘[Petit] remarked that deceased had
not looked well for about a week or
ten days; and on Sunday last he had a
long conversation with him, induced
by the deceased, who complained of a
pain in his chest, and said he thought
he should give up his profession,
requesting the witness at the same
time to endeavour to obtain another
situation for him. The deceased’s
conversation appeared confused at
the time, but the witness “was very far
from thinking that he contemplated
suicide”.’
The inquest delivered a verdict:
‘That the deceased, Henri Joseph
Stephan, destroyed himself while in a
state of temporary insanity.’
There is no way of knowing what
compelled Stephan to end his life, but
the evidence and his drastic actions
make it clear that he was a troubled
man.
Finding a grave
After reading so many reports on
Stephan’s death, I wanted to hnd out
where he was laid to rest. I logged into
my Ancestry.co.uk account and found
his burial recorded on a bishop’s
transcript (BT). These transcripts
are copies of the baptism, burial and
marriage entries in parish records
that were sent to the bishop every
year. From this record, I discovered
Stephan was laid to rest at All Soul’s
Cemetery in London. Now known
as Kensal Green Cemetery, this was
one of the ‘magnihcent seven’; the
private cemeteries that were created
in 19th-century London to alleviate
overcrowding in parish cemeteries.
A call to the cemetery conhrmed
the presence of Stephan’s grave, and
following some email correspondence,
the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery
(www.kensalgreen.co.uk) was able
to provide me with an exact grave
number and location. Its records also
revealed that Emile Petit owned the
plot in which he buried his brother-
in-law; Stephan’s sister was eventually
laid to rest here too.
One hot day in the summer I made
the pilgrimage to Kensal Green, to
hnd Henri Stephan’s hnal resting
place. In an overgrown corner of the
cemetery I found his neglected grave,
and laid a bunch of flowers for the
man, now at peace, whose sad story
had so intrigued me.
Henri
Stephan
played the
horn.
Anna Maria Barry is a cultural
historian who specialises in
1 9th-century entertainment.
She is completing a PhD on
19th-century opera singers at
Oxford Brookes University, where
she is a member of the OBERTO
Opera Research Unit (www.
obertobrookes.com). You can
follow her on Twitter: @AnnaMariaB87,
AKensal Green Cemetery, formerly All Souls’
"^Cemetery, where Stephan was laid to res^
70 Familyitee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
DIGGING DEEPER
S ometimes family history
research is a whizz-bang rush
of discovery, where everything
falls into place. Other times
it’s a long-haul trawl, tedious but
necessary, in the hope that a crucial
record will tip the balance one way or
the other. I’ve a feeling that trying to
sort out which of the two Joseph ‘Lea’
and Martha marriages I found is mine
could be one of the latter days, so let’s
kick off at www.familysearch.org.
Now, I’ve two main candidates for
my 4x great-grandparents - Joseph Lea
and Martha Gallymore who married
at Middlewich, Cheshire, in March
1788, and Joseph Lea and Martha
Twemlowe, who married at Brereton-
cum-Smethwick five months later. I
hope I can sort them into two distinct
families - location, children, baptisms
- then take it from there, cross-
referencing with the more detailed
parish records at Findmypast.co.uk.
Let’s go then, inputting surname
Lea (no ‘h’), father Joseph, mother
Martha, county Cheshire, and a wide
date-range for births, 1785 to 1820.
Immediately, what looks like the
Brereton-cum-Smethwick family fills
the first results page, but wait, there’s
another brood of Leas baptised in
Bidston, near Birkenhead. No, surely
too far away, can’t be mine, can they?
Looking closer, it’s simpler than I’d
hrst thought, and 10 minutes of listing
and scribbling later. I’ve got myself
two distinct families, with little Leas
baptised in the same parish at regular
two or three-year intervals - eight for
the Brereton parents, four for the
Bidston pair. Crucially, they’re all
Leas, not Leahs. One ‘Lea’ out of place
might be a misspelt Leah, but these
look to be proper Lea families. So not
mine then! Does this rule out Martha
Twemlowe and put the spotlight firmly
on Martha Callymore of Middlewich?
Scrolling down, we move from Lea
to Leah, and here’s that Middlewich
1788 baptism of a Thomas Leah, which
I spotted last month. Below it, my 3x
great-grandfather Joseph’s baptism in
Stockport, 1790. Surprisingly, that’s
pretty much it, which leaves me with
Diarist Gill Shaw charts the rollercoaster
ride of researching her family history.
Bradshaw and ‘Thomas Leah of
Woodford, husbandman’. He sounds a
tad too well-to-do for my lot.
From there we jump to 1823, when
Middlewich-born Thomas Leah would
have been aged 34/35. At Daresbury, a
Mary Thomason; and at Prestbury the
same year, a Nancy Aspinall, with the
groom a silk weaver from Macclesfield,
(and I think Joseph junior and family
were living in nearby Broken Cross by
now...). Lastly, 1825, Macclesheld again,
Sarah Millington, widow, and the
groom a smith by trade. Six marriages,
but not a single useful father’s name or
witness - swizz! I’m none the wiser.
What next? Well, back at
FamilySearch we could look for
any little Leahs with a father called
Thomas, and perhaps one of these six
ladies as the mother. . .
With a date range of 1807-1830 there
are a fair few results so I make a stab at
ordering the children under ‘Thomas
and Sarah’, ‘Thomas and Mary’ and
so on. One leaps out: on 6 April 1828
at St Michael’s, Macclesfield (where
several of Joseph junior’s children were
baptised), Thomas and Nancy Leah
christened a daughter, Martha.
Well, well. I think back to the
time I searched the 1841 and 1851
Censuses in an attempt to link my
3x great-grandfather’s siblings. On
both, there was a mysterious young
Martha Leah - described as ‘niece’ in
1851. In fact, there were two random
Marthas in 1841, aged 14 and 15, and
I’d fondly imagined it was the same
girl, wandering between her aunts’
houses on census night for a laugh.
Could this be her? Martha baptised in
1828 would have been only 13 when
the 1841 Census was taken, but how
accurate were the ages on it? If ‘my’
Thomas Leah did die in 1831, could
that Martha be his orphaned child?
My head is spinning but there’s not
one shred of proof. Now, just to tease
you, there is one other intriguing
Thomas Leah record I spotted on the
way here, but we’re out of space! To be
continued... Merry Christmas! V*"
three possibilities: one, the records
are lost or never existed; two, Martha
Gallymore and Joseph Lea/Leah
didn’t have any more children; or three
(barely daring to hope. . .), these are
my 4x great-grandparents, Thomas
Leah is Joseph junior’s big brother, and
after his birth the family moved from
Middlewich to Stockport where Joseph
and his siblings were born. Crikey, am I
going to have to update that family tree
I made already? We’re going to need a
bigger sheet of paper!
OK, let’s run with this. First we need
to find Thomas’s baptism in the parish
registers at Findmypast in case it has
more detail. After that, hunt for him in
later life. Can I link him to the other
Leahs? Did he marry? Did he make the
1841 Census? Well, if my wild hunch
that he’s the mysterious Thomas Leah
buried 1831 in the family grave in
Edgeley, Stockport, turns out to be
right, then no, unfortunately he didn’t.
It’s either a medical miracle
or a shotgun wedding
But Steady on, one step at a time, hrst
look for a Thomas Leah baptised 1788,
Cheshire. Here we go: Middlewich, 29
June, ‘Joseph Leah and Martha his wife
had a child baptiz’d nam’d Thomas’.
No more detail sadly. And, of course,
I now realise, a slight spanner in the
works. If Joseph and Martha married
in March, and Thomas was born at
the end of June, then we’re looking at
either a medical miracle or a shotgun
wedding. My money’s on the shotgun!
While we’re here, what about
Thomas Leah marriages, looking at
1806 onwards. Oddly, there aren’t
many. There’s a Thomas Leah, weaver
(weaver’s good, old Joseph was a
weaver...), and Ann Pickford marrying
in 1806; and the same year another
weaver, this time the bride a Sarah
Poole. But Thomas would only have
been 18 (too young?), plus there’s no
indication whereabouts in Cheshire.
Moving on to 1811, we’ve Ann
Gill Shaw is editor of Dogs
Monthly magazine and former
assistant editor of Practical
Family History. She lives in
Cambridgeshire and loves
singing, walking and tracking
down elusive ancestors.
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 Family-rree 71
^ AUTOGRAPH BOOKS
Susan Brewer shares her fascination with
autograph aibums, which can reveal so much
about a relative’s personaiity and the period
they lived in.
Autograph
albums can give us a
real insight into our relatives’
personalities.
Susan’s great-grandfather David Evans with his
daughter Gladys, aged around 13, in June 1920.
Family heirlooms
David, born in 1855, must have been
fond of puzzles - no doubt the brain
I never knew my great-grandfather,
David Evans, but I do know that he
was an erudite man who worked as
a bookseller’s assistant. In fact, he
developed an intricate new hling index for
the business, and many years later, in one
of those coincidences that tend to happen
in family history, my father was employed
by that company. He knew nothing of his
wife’s - my mum’s - grandfather, and it
was only many years later when I began
researching the family tree that he realised
he had been using that same index daily!
72 Family’Itee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
that helped him fathom out that
revolutionary indexing system
demanded complicated problems as a
form of relaxation - as demonstrated
in an old autograph album that I
inherited a few years ago. The book
had belonged to one of his four
daughters, Vera, born in 1902, and
inside was a page that looked at first
glance like an exaggerated form of
scribble. However the more I looked,
the more I realised there were words,
all jumbled up, criss-crossing the
page. Finally, I managed to transcribe
it:
'With paternal pride
I here subscribe
My name graphicauto
Within this book
Friends also look
May pen their name or photo. ’
arm. It’s captioned, ‘Any Offers?’.
Memories of Grandad
My grandfather, Walter Giddens, who
had married the eldest sister, Beatrice,
obviously adored drawing witty
cartoons in their books. Among them
is a leaping smiley hsh captioned,
‘Please drop me a line’, as well as a
caricature of himself stuck inside
a thick tome and entitled, ‘Hello!
What am I doing in this book?’. Also,
because he had been beaten to the
first page of Vera’s album, Walter
surpassed himself by coming up with a
drawing on the following page of two
page boys, one triumphantly standing
on the other and captioned, ‘On the
second page’, with an arrow pointing
to the exultant one labelled ‘The hrst
page’. My grandad had a great sense
of humour! When I was a child in the
1950s, he wrote in my book:
He wrote that in 1919, when he
was 64 years old, a bit more complex
than the variation on the classic, ‘By
hook or by crook’ lines that he wrote
in 1914 in his daughter Hilda’s book:
‘Byjingo, I’ll be the first as you see.’
He signed it ‘Dad’, writing his name
underneath. Hilda was then 13, so
perhaps he didn’t want to give her
something too complicated.
Five years later, the youngest
sister, Gladys, stuck a silk
union jack in Vera’s book,
patriotically writing.
'Algy met a hear
The bear met Algy
The hear was bulgy
The bulge was Algy. ’
Sadly though, my little blue
autograph book was lost, together with
all its memories, in the late 1960s.
‘Britannia rules the
waves’. Not to be outdone,
Hilda painted a cartoon w
character of a boy in a sailor
suit with a telescope under his
Telling times
Browsing through these
early autograph books,
delighting in the way that,
I decades ago, people had
I time to draw or paint
delightful pictures or to
pen thoughtful messages
y
I
4
' Some of the wonderful autographs and illustrations in
1 Susan’s inherited autograph albums.
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
and loving thoughts, made me want
to collect them. I acquired a few and
was amazed by the contents - what a
chunk of social history. The books are
crammed with comments regarding
suffragettes and politics, poignant verses
about war, humorous rhymes, extracts of
poems and words of advice, such as this
‘recipe’ from 1908:
'Recipe for Cabinet Pudding:
Take afresh young Suffragist, add a large
idea of her own importance and as much
sauce as you like. Allow her to stand on a
Cabinet Minister’s doorstep until in a white
heat. Mix with one or two policeman, well
roll in the mud and when hot run into a
Police Court and allow to simmer. Garnish
with sauce of martyrdom. Popular dish -
always in season. Lost - a little self-respect. ’
Or the wartime (penned in 1914):
'How to Cook A German Sausage:
Cook on a British Kitchener
Greece well with Russian tallow
Flavour with a little Jellicoe
Servia up with French capons and Brussels
scouts. ’
Some of the paintings in my books are
beautiful, often depictions of women
from earlier eras - like us, people from
before the First World War were just as
fascinated by ‘period costume’. There
are cartoons influenced by artists such
as Louis Wain, Walt Disney, Mabel Lucie
Attwell and Beatrix Potter, while designs
featuring landscapes, flowers, animals
and children were popular. The most
favoured verse, which seems to be in
almost every book, is the one beginning
‘Roses are red’, while, of course, ‘By
hook or by crook’ was much loved too.
For me, the interesting thing about
the autographs, even in those books that
I have acquired from strangers, is the
way that their character shines through.
Thoughtful, happy, sad, bossy, flippant,
sentimental - you can tell a lot from an
^ '*£■
inscription in an autograph album! w
the autfiorf^
A post-war ‘baby-boomer’,
Susan Brewer began researching
her family tree in the 1960s, but still
has a long way to go. She’s a writer
of books about collectables and also
of light-hearted novels. However, she
has just completed a novel loosely
woven around her ancestors in the
Cambridgeshire Fens, which she hopes
will be published next year.
Christmas 2015 Familyrree 73
BALL GOWNS & BLACK BOW TIES
Join Jayne Shrimpton
in a ceiebration of
beautiful ciothes fit for
a Christmas bali.
Danse de l Ours
(The Grisly Bear)
by Edouard
Touraine, 1912,
illustrates the
vogue for more
energetic dancing
and exotic evening
styles of the pre-
WW1 era.
u
74 Familyitee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
A s Christmas draws near,
we may well be arraying
ourselves in glittering party
clothes and other stylish
outhts for festive gatherings with
relatives, neighbours and friends.
Earlier generations loved dressing
up too, and here we look at the ‘posh
frocks’ and formal suits worn by past
family members on special occasions.
Dressed to impress
Traditionally in polite society it was
considered essential to dress correctly
for the time of day and for different
occasions. In the mornings modest,
relaxed indoor garments were
permitted; then as social activities
entered the day’s schedule, clothing
became progressively smarter or
more ‘dressy’, culminating in formal
ensembles for evening wear. Naturally
this sartorial routine, which required
the support of many servants, was
unfamiliar to most working people,
although by the mid- 1800 s as the
etiquette of dress and social conduct
became more pronounced, ancestors
aspiring to better themselves and
ascend the social ladder may have
followed the guidelines published
in contemporary magazines and
manuals. Even in ordinary homes
usually a distinction existed between
work garments or street wear and
comfortable indoor clothes. It was
widely acknowledged that one should
appear well-groomed when outdoors
in public and when visiting friends
and relatives or hosting gatherings;
while attending church on Sunday,
family weddings and local events
provided further opportunities for
wearing a smart suit, new hat, lace
collar or bow tie.
Victorian ensembles
Our more privileged and prosperous
ancestors will have enjoyed active
social lives and probably attended
special afternoon or evening events
requiring immaculate, even exclusive
forms of dress. During the Victorian
era varying degrees of formality
developed for different occasions,
and a well-dressed lady needed
several costumes: a relaxed ‘at-home’
evening dress, an ornate dinner
party gown, a more lavish costume
for receptions and visits to the opera,
theatre and concert hall, and, lastly,
the finest toilette for balls and dances.
Generally ‘full dress’ (evening dress)
was fashioned with a low-cut neckline
and short sleeves, although gowns
Left: This plate from
Modes de Paris,
March 1 841 , displays
the pastel silk
gowns with plunging
necklines and lace
and floral decoration
admired in the early-
Victorian era.
Right: This plate from
The English Woman’s
Domestic Magazine,
1 876, shows the
ornate coiffures and
complex draperies
of luxurious haute
couture evening wear
at this time.
worn for intimate dinners and parties
were typically more concealing than
ball dresses. While dinner dress
could be handsome, even sumptuous,
ball gowns should be fine and
light - feminine and alluring, but
also practical for dancing in stuffy,
crowded ballrooms. Ironically, the
amount of clothing was at odds
with the terminology used, in that
‘undress’ (informal morning wear)
featured a high neckline and long
sleeves, while semi-formal ‘half-dress’
exposed more of the female figure;
and ‘full dress’, with its plunging
neckline and bare arms, could be very
revealing.
Evening wear essentially followed
fashion and early-Victorian evening
bodices were heavily-boned and
By the 1 860s
wealthy ancestors
sometimes posed
for photographs in
full evening dress,
as in this carte de
visite of a married
lady wearing a
handsome velvet
gown, cl 866-1 868.
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 Familyrree 75
pointed. Extremely decollete (‘...
far too much so for strict delicacy
to approve’, according to the Ladies
Cabinet, 1844), the neckline was worn
well off the shoulders and often
hnished with a deep falling lace
‘bertha’. Further decoration included
delicate lace flounces and ornamental
flowers, the short sleeves puffed and
flounced or edged with lace ruffles.
Full skirts sometimes featured over-
skirts trimmed with lace or festooned
with ribbons and flowers. Favoured
materials included plain, ‘shot’ and
figured silks, glace silks, tarlatan
and barege and soft colours: creamy-
white, pink, pale blue and lemon.
Accessories included neat fans, short
kid gloves or black silk mittens for
parties, and headdresses of lace and
ribbons or flower wreaths.
As fashion became more
conspicuous in the mid-1800s so
evening wear grew increasingly
opulent. Crinoline-supported dinner
and ball gowns reached immense
proportions in the later 1850s and
early 1860s, further accentuated by
tiers of lace or swags of fabric. For
balls and formal receptions, ideally
young unmarried girls wore white
gowns of fine gauzy material such
By the late-1 800s more of
our ancestors had occasions
to adopt evening wear. Dark
net and watered (moire) silk
are worn with jewellery and
a fan in this carte de visite of
C1890.
as muslin, organdie or
tarlatan - delicate fabrics
suggestive of youth
and innocence - while
extravagant tulles and
handsome, richly-coloured
silks and satins embellished
with lace, were considered
suitable for married
women. Such distinctions
signalled whether or not
a lady was ‘available’ in
the marriage market - a
matter of importance, since
introductions to potential
suitors were often made
and courtships conducted
at evening events.
With the rise of haute
couture, wealthy ladies
visited Paris for designer
evening gowns - exclusive dresses
fashioned from luxurious fabrics
that cost a small fortune and were
usually only wearable once or twice,
for gossamer fabrics snagged easily
and soon became limp and tawdry.
Evening dresses of the early 1870s
were frothy confections of pastel
silks glimpsed through overskirts of
muslin, net or gauze. Bustles, panniers
and swishing trained hemlines
created a feminine, curvaceous effect
softened further by frills, flounces
and bows. As bodices lengthened and
skirts narrowed during the later 1870s,
dinner and ball gowns grew more
slender and drapery cascaded into a
sweeping train. Hair throughout the
decade was dressed into an ornate
chignon and decorated for evening
wear with feathers, ribbons and
flowers.
During the early 1880s a low square
neckline with covered shoulders
prevailed, until late-decade, when a
square, round or V-shaped decolletage
was worn with narrow shoulder straps,
exposing the upper arms again.
Fate-Victorian styles could be very
elaborate, displaying frills, bows,
lace and new embellishments such
as metal beads, sequins, artificial
pearls and even small stuffed birds
and insects, the resplendent effect
enhanced with vibrant colours and
rich fabrics including Genoese velvet,
plush, Ottoman silks and brocades.
Fong white kid, or suede or coloured
silk gloves were worn with bracelets
and large fans were often formed of
ostrich plumes or painted gauze. The
sleeveless evening gown remained
popular until the 1890s, when large
puffed sleeves were introduced and
skirts flared out gracefully towards the
hemline. Diaphanous over-dresses of
net and chiffon layered over coloured
silk under-dresses were much admired
by the late 1890s, accessorised with
long evening gloves fastened with
pearl buttons and co-ordinating satin
shoes.
Edwardian opulence
High-ranking Edwardian ladies still
had exclusive costumes made by
Parisian fashion houses although
This HJ Nicholl & Co catalogue
illustration from c1929 shows both the
traditional male dress coat with white
tie and more modern dinner jacket or
‘tuxedo’.
76 Familyfiee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
Images: Black dress cdv, copy courtesy of Christine Morris; The Needlewoman, the ‘Grisly Bear’, Modes de Paris, 1841, HJ Nicholl catalogue , crepe dinner dress,
1950s’ couple, courtesy of Jayne Shrimpton; Elsa Schiaparelli designs, Christmas party, images from The Queen and The English Woman’s Domestic Magazine,
courtesy of Maureen Harris; lady in velvet gown, courtesy of www.cartedevisite.co.uk.
couturiers like Worth and Paquin
were now opening prestigious
London showrooms featuring live
mannequins. Middle-class women
purchased French-inspired designs
in up-market department stores or
had personalised versions made by
their favourite local dressmaker. The
sinuous art nouveau aesthetic of the
early 1900s favoured a curvaceous
female silhouette, this being
expressed most strikingly in lavish
evening gowns with narrow shoulder
straps, hour-glass bodices and
clinging skirts with hsh-tail hemlines.
Fashionable materials included silk,
satin, chiffon and net, ornamented
profusely with lace, embroidery and
sequins. The ultra-feminine ensemble
was completed with long htted gloves,
a fan, a pearl or diamond choker
necklace, and, for the most formal
events, a tiara - the evening accessory
of the Edwardian era.
Ballrooms & jazz clubs
During the 20th century popular
music became increasingly signihcant
in shaping nightlife. Syncopated
ragtime music introduced livelier
dancing into ballrooms and the
performance of more active dances
such as the Turkey Trot and the Grisly
Bear were aided in the early 1910s by
the development of a more natural
female silhouette and softer, pliable
corsets. The trend in evening wear
was for slender, layered tunic gowns
and innovative harem pants inspired
by the pioneering designs of Parisian
couturier Paul Poiret. Fashioned
in floating chiffons, sensuous silks
and plush velvets in vibrant colours
ornamented with bold applique work
and exotic tassels, pre-WWl styles
owed much to the theatrical influence
and imagined ‘orientalism’ of Leon
Bakst and the Ballet Russes, who had
entranced Paris in 1909.
Evening modes of the early
1920s were striking, luxurious yet
quintessentially elegant, featuring
sedate hemlines and traditional
accessories. However a young,
pleasure-seeking
generation was now
frequenting public dance
halls and jazz clubs and from mid-
decade, as the craze grew for rhythmic
jazz music and energetic dancing, new
tubular, knee-length flapper dance
frocks in dazzling white, jet black, jade
green, lacquer red, deep rose, burnt
orange, even metallic fabrics were all
the rage. Layered, split skirts, swaying
fringes, glittering beads and sequins,
jewelled and diamante trimmings,
strings of eye-catching beads and long
feather boas all reflected the light and
accentuated movement.
Cocktails and dinner dances
Bars, dancing and cocktail parties
epitomised 1930s’ nightlife and,
under the influence of Hollywood
hlms, evening wear acquired a new
sophistication. Hemlines of graceful
evening gowns lowered to ankle
length or trailed languidly on the
floor, while soft, draping materials
such as shimmering satin and
clinging crepe de Chine in shades
like coral, powder blue, eau de nil,
taupe or classic black were bias-cut
to mould to the hgure. At the high
end of fashion, scintillating dresses
featured asymmetrical necklines
worn off one shoulder, or plunged to
a daringly low V at the
back, revealing golden,
newly-bronzed skin,
accessories including
gleaming gold and silver
lame dance shoes, velvet
evening coats, deep
fur stoles and slinky
shoulder capes. Shining
waved hair framed
glowing faces painted
with glamorous movie-
star cosmetics: bright
lipstick, rouged cheeks,
mascara, glossed eyelids
and arched plucked
eyebrows.
During the Second
World War social
occasions were restricted
and due to shortages,
few people acquired
During the 1930s clinging bias-cut evening gowns and
stunning capes and jackets created a new glamour, as
seen in these designs by Elsa Schiaparelli, 1938.
This elegant post-
WW2 full-length brown
crepe dinner dress cost
around £1 7 1 1 s and 1 1
coupons, as featured in
a 1947 edition of Good
Housekeeping magazine.
www.family-tree.co.uk
Christmas 2015 Familyrree 77
new clothes, but with Big Band
orchestras and swing music popular at
military bases and other local dances,
many servicemen and women wore
their uniforms, while civilian girls
wore practical knee-length dresses.
Afterwards a stately feminine elegance
returned, despite continued rationing,
and formal evening wear was
purchased (by those who could afford
it), using coupons and money. As life
gradually returned to normal and a
modern era dawned in the 1950s, our
more recent relatives and perhaps
some Family Tree readers enjoyed
visiting dance halls and attending
works dinner dances, sports and social
club functions and the like, wearing
full evening dress or fashionable full-
skirted cocktail dresses.
Male evening dress
Visually men’s evening dress can seem
uninteresting compared to ladies’
eye-catching styles, although creating
the correct impression was equally
important. Initially a black ‘dress coat’
was de rigeur- a tail coat cut in straight
across the waist, tailored from hne
milled cloth and usually featuring a
silk or velvet collar and facings. This
was worn with long black pantaloons
or tight-htting knee breeches, with
black silk stockings and soft dress
shoes and a white evening dress shirt
with a pleated or frilled front. Initially
the waistcoat could be coloured but
after the mid-I9th century it was
usually black or white and a white
waistcoat was required for full evening
dress, accessorised with a white
necktie. The outht was completed with
white evening gloves and a collapsible
opera hat (top hat with a spring in the
crown), called a gibus.
After the mid-I800s trousers
increasingly superseded breeches and
pantaloons for evening wear: generally
black, in the later 1800s they were
usually cut narrower than regular
trousers, the outside leg seam often
hnished with black braid. The tail
coat and white accessories remained
correct for formal occasions such as
grand assemblies, public dinners and
balls, but during the 1880s a more
relaxed suit evolved for less formal
events. Based on the regular lounge
jacket, the new hip-length evening
jacket closely resembled the American
Tuxedo. It was worn with a white or
black waistcoat or a cummerbund,
black evening trousers and usually a
black bow tie.
The debonair male tail coat, silk
opera hat, white gloves, cane and
Alluring halter-neck cocktail dresses in
gleaming fabrics were popular for dinner-
dances in the mid-20th century, as seen
in this family photograph, c1955.
evening cloak or coat remained
a ‘timeless’ style for balls and
formal events, its enduring appeal
encouraged by the evening dress
worn on stage and screen, especially
in musicals featuring Fred Astaire.
However, the more relaxed dinner
jacket and black bow tie became
increasingly popular for events such as
private dinner parties, the theatre and
concerts and over time the dress suit
passed out of regular use altogether.
Everybody is well-dressed in evening or formal day wear for this festive scene, ‘Around the Christmas Tree’, illustrated in
Art-Gout-Beaute, December 1923.
78 Famiyriee Christmas 2015
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Moving house
0 These photos are
copies from glass-
plate negatives of
extremely high quality, from
a collection in our family.
We think they were taken by
George Sadler (c1 823-1 901)
or by his son Evan George
Sadler (1 857-1 932), who both
had photographic studios in
Cardiff from around 1 850 to
the early 1 900s. The people
in the photos are definitely
not connected with the Sadler
family in Cardiff at this period.
The pictures appear to be a
commission to photograph a
family and their new house.
There is so much information
here: they demand to be
identified! We take the
location to be the Cardiff
area, but where is it? The
layout of the house is so clear
that it should be possible to
identify it, if it still exists. Then
from the censuses we might
identify the family. From the
women’s and children’s dress
I assume it to be the mid-
1890s: is this reasonable? I
am in the process of showing
copies to local history
societies in the Cardiff area in
the hope that someone might
recognise the setting. I have
yet to visit the record office.
Brian Pollard
pollardgen@talktalk.net
A This is an interesting
set of images deriving
from the traditional
glass-plate negatives used
by most Victorian and
Edwardian photographers.
Convenient dry photographic
plates were available by
the late 1870s/1880s and,
along with a general lowering
Among the various photographs
are depicted several family
members ranging from adults to
small children and the servants
who completed their household.
Four or more domestic servants are present
here, including maids in smart black uniforms
and aprons and a horse-drawn coachman
wearing traditional livery.
Were these photos taken to mark the family
moving into their newly built home?
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of prices of photographic
equipment, encouraged a
surge in amateur photography
chiefly among middle-class
hobbyists. Glass negatives
sometimes survive within
family collections, reflecting
our ancestors’ interests. I
cannot confirm from their
appearance whether these
particular photographs are
the work of a skilled amateur
or professional photographer,
but have no good reason
to doubt your belief that
they were taken by Cardiff
photographers, George and
Evan Sadler.
I agree that these
photographs were intended to
record the moving of a family
into their new home - quite a
common photographic theme
by the late 19th century. This
late-Victorian villa is clearly
a new dwelling, as we see
from the fresh brickwork of
w ww.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
the buildings and pristine
grounds.
I would suggest that three
different generations may
be portrayed here, although
it is a little difficult from the
diverse groupings to judge
who is who. For example,
I believe the lady in a dark
gown seated with a man, little
girl and two ‘teenagers’ in
one photo appears wearing
a white apron in another.
So was she the lady of the
house, or (less likely) the
nanny? Several servants
are depicted. This confirms
what we can deduce from
the setting - that this was a
fairly affluent family with a
comfortable lifestyle.
The date of these photos
is crucial when it comes to
identification of the subjects.
Luckily the style of the ladies’
sleeves indicates a firm time
frame of c1 898-1 901, the
shoulder frills and epaulettes
featured on several women’s
sleeves representing the late
phase of the puffed ‘leg-o’-
mutton’ style, which had died
out by 1901. The turn-of-
century date coincides well
with the 1901 Census and
it seems highly probable
that you will find most or all
of these people recorded
there. As for determining the
location, this should become
much clearer as you progress
with contacting Cardiff local
and family history societies
and Glamorgan Archives.
JS?*
Bruckner Smith
O Herbert William
Bruckner Smith
was born at
Fareham on 15 January
1889. Herbert William Smith
joined the Royal Naval Air
Service (RNAS) in 1 91 7,
was transferred to the RAF
in 1918 and discharged in
1920. On his service record
he gave his date of birth as
15 January 1886 and his
‘wife’ as Alice. She was Alice
Harding nee Rhodes, and
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
already married. Fareham
Register Office confirms
that there were no Herbert
William Smiths born on that
date, but there was a Herbert
Bruckner Smith. I think there
is a strong possibility that on
his enlistment he dropped the
German-sounding name.
I now have found that HWB
Smith was married in 1921
to Blanche Eliza Harris. The
marriage certificate confirms
that HWB and HW Smith are
the same person.
Herbert William Bruckner
Smith died on 15 April
1960 in Oxford. The death
certificate describes him as
‘director, poultry farmer’.
There was money left to
his sister and brother, both
Bruckner Smiths, and another
brother, just Smith. Any help
confirming his whereabouts
after 1930 would be helpful.
Bob Scott
bob741 7@sky.com
A lt’s always interesting
when you encounter
something like
this in your family history.
Historically relations between
the UK and Prussia/Germany
were good and, until the late
19th century, we still owned
Heligoland. But as you note,
German names fell rapidly
out of favour once the war
started, being informally
dropped or anglicised. Cases
where some parts of a family
adopt a (usually) maternal
surname as a sort of double-
barrelled name are also quite
common.
The discrepancy in date of
birth is less easily explained.
There’s no obvious reason for
giving a birth date three years
earlier than the actual one
and this may just be an error
by the clerk who compiled
the service documentation
and was then continued by
Herbert. On the other hand
it’s possible Herbert really
did believe he was born in
1886 and gave that date
in good faith to both the
Your questions answered
service clerk and the priest
conducting the marriage.
So many newspapers are
now available online that
it’s worth searching them -
poultry farmers, for example,
might feature in agricultural
show prize lists. You may
also like to search the 1939
Register, now available for
England and Wales online
(see pages 23-25), and
follow Emma Jolly’s advice
for people researching the
mid-20th century period (see
pages 26-29). DF
No evidence of
death
O My 2x great-
grandfather was
Henry Bartlett
from St Germans, Cornwall.
He was a stoker in the
Royal Navy, aged 23 when
he joined, according to
his continuous service
engagement of 21 March
1867. He married Julia
Willoughby in 1868 and was
on the Prince Consort in
Naples Harbour for the 1 871
Census. His number was
468B. Then he vanished.
According to family lore
he died from wounds in an
Indian battle and was buried
in Malta, with his comrades
erecting a tombstone for
him. But there is no record
in English births, marriages
or deaths, naval records
or Families in British India
Society (FI BIS) of his death
or divorce. There is no record
of his death in Malta. There
is no record of Julia Bartlett
receiving a naval pension
but she did remarry in March
1872 in Plymouth. There is
also no record of her and
her daughter, Frances, in the
1871 Census under Bartlett
or her new married name,
from 1872, of Durham.
Surely an active stoker
cannot die or disappear
without mention in the
records?
Doug Harman
lordsdoug@yahoo.com
A If people didn’t
disappear without
trace family history
would be very dull! I’m
slightly surprised there is
only the continuous service
engagement in ADM139 at The
National Archives (TNA) for
Henry. I would have expected
more - notably in ADM
188/246 (indexes to registers
of seamen’s services), which
would lead to more details
of service - however, I found
nothing. HMS Prince Consort
served in the Mediterranean
from 1867 to 1871 so would
have returned home only a
few months after the census
was taken. It would be worth
looking for her ship’s log
in ADM 53 at TNA. Logs
seldom show anything about
individuals but will tell you
where the ship was. As he
was on HMS Prince Consort
for the 1871 Census, and his
widow remarried in March
1872, knowing the ship’s
programme will enable you to
pin down when he might have
died. Information about naval
burials in Malta is surprisingly
thin considering it was a main
fleet base and there was a
hospital at Bighi. Some naval
cemeteries were built over and
the remains interred elsewhere.
I’m slightly sceptical about the
India bit as the timing doesn’t
seem to match, but the ship’s
log may help. DF
My fatli
O
Mv_fether’s parents
I need to overcome
I the inability to identify
my father’s parents
even though both are recorded
on his birth certificate. My main
question is how can I identify
my paternal grandparents
when all I have is a birth
certificate and adoption
agreement but nothing to
substantiate them with other
documentation, such as
marriage certificate, electoral
register, trade directory etc?
Deborah Winter
deborahwinterl @aol. co.uk
Christmas 2015 FamiY’Free 81
in association with
YOUR Q& A ancestry. co.uk
Can you help?
Ceylon or India?
O When I was young, my maternal grandmother
mentioned that her father, Joshua Millington (born in
1877), a Great Western Railway and London Midland
& Scottish railway engineer based at Worcester, spent a short
time in India. I have discovered on Findmypast.co.uk an
outgoing passenger list entry for a J Millington, engineer, aged
37, travelling alone in 1915 from London to Colombo, Ceylon
(now Sri Lanka). Apart from the destination, all the details
match my grandmother’s account. Can anyone determine
whether the photo was taken in Ceylon rather than India,
as claimed?
Michael Langtree
mikelangtree@yahoo.co.uk
A We only have two
documents to play
with here; your
father’s birth certificate and a
legal document outlining the
terms of his adoption. These
tell us that he wasn’t adopted
until he was nearly four years
old in 1939. Later that same
year, the 1939 Adoption of
Children (Regulation) Act was
passed, which would have
required the involvement of
the relevant local authority,
but in February 1939 an
adoption could still be
arranged informally, between
the parents and the adopters.
It’s likely therefore that there
is no paperwork surviving
from the adoption process
other than the signed
agreement that you already
have.
The birth certificate names
a father (Frank Mitchell) and
a mother (Annie Mitchell,
formerly Collins) whereas the
adoption agreement mentions
only the mother, here named
as Beatrice Annie Mitchell.
This invites the question,
‘What happened to Frank?’
to which there are only three
possible answers: he died;
he left Beatrice/Annie; or he
never existed.
The last of these may
seem like an odd suggestion;
clearly (biologically) there
must have been a man
involved in fathering the child
but we only have Annie’s
word for it (as the informant
on your father’s birth
certificate) that he was called
Frank Mitchell.
It’s clear that there was
no marriage in England and
Wales between a Frank
Mitchell and a Beatrice/Annie
Collins (I can’t see any sign
of one in Scotland or Ireland
either) and there don’t seem
to be any other children of the
marriage (if indeed there was
a marriage) so, unless they
married outside the UK, at
least some of the information
given by Annie on the birth
certificate must be suspect.
One of the biggest
problems we have here is that
the two surnames (Mitchell
and Collins) are just too
common and the uncertainty
around your grandmother’s
forename doesn’t exactly
help. All of this makes it next
to impossible to identify
any potential birth or death
records for her.
I would want to look at the
electoral registers for her
home address (it’s the same
on both documents); it would
be interesting to see who’s
listed there and for how long
(unfortunately, no electoral
registers were created
between 1940 and 1944). I
would also want to check the
1939 National Register, now
available at Findmypast.co.uk
and at The National Archives
(TNA). This will hopefully give
you some vital information
about your grandmother,
including her date of birth. DA
Industrial school
O My father Albert
Ernest Bastin
was born on 1 7
November 1 905 at 36 College
Street, Homerton, Middlesex.
On the 1911 Census he
and the family are living
at 74 Huxley Road, Upper
Edmonton, Middlesex.
His father Arthur Henry
Bastin died of typhoid on 2
January 1914. His mother
Mary Ann Bastin married
widower Charles W Meddings
on 8 August 1916.
The family moved to 46
Skeltons Lane, Leyton, Essex
where they had a general
store. The business failed
and I next found Charles W
and Mary Ann Meddings on
the 1 91 9 electoral register
living at 25 Hartwell Cottages,
London E8.
On the 1 921 electoral
register they are living at
3 Elton Street, Islington
N16. Charles W Meddings
committed suicide on 31 July
1921 in the River Lea near
Leabridge, London E5.
On the 1 925 electoral
register Mary Ann Meddings
and her eldest son Arthur
Henry Bastin are living at 3
Elton Street, Islington N16.
My father Albert Ernest
Bastin married Annie Louisa
Tutthill on 5 August 1928
aged 22, and their address
is given as 3 Elton Street,
Islington.
He often mentioned the
workhouse, telling me how
awful it was, but he would
never give more details. He
learned tailoring but would
only say that it was at college.
Could this have been a trade
school?
My problem is that,
between the 1 91 1 Census
and his marriage in 1928, 1
have been unable to find any
details about him. Can you
help?
Derek Bastin
derek_bastin@btinternet.com
A lt’s most likely that
your father was in
an industrial school
rather than a workhouse.
Industrial schools grew out
of the mid-Victorian poor
law system and the 1908
Children’s Act set out a
number of circumstances in
which children under the age
of 14 might be admitted to
one of these institutions. In
this case, it seems likely that
your grandmother was unable
to look after your father
following her first husband’s
death in 1914 and may have
been declared ‘unfit’.
The problem is knowing
which of the scores of
industrial schools in the north
London/Middlesex area your
father was in. His ‘case’
would have been handled
by the poor law authorities
- probably the Edmonton
Union, as the family was
82 Fami]y-Itee Christmas 2015
www.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
Can you help?
Your questions answered
Regimental dress belt?
O This mystery belt is owned by a friend of mine. It is
gold braid backed with thin fine leather, fastening
with an elaborate gilt buckle with two silver badges
of the Royal Engineers with the cypher of George V mounted
on it. These are usually attributed by collectors to the wives
and daughters of officers of the regiment whose badge they
carry and were supposedly worn as a formal evening belt on
appropriate regimental occasions, probably in India or other
areas of empire. The expensive materials and the small size -
this example is about a 22-inch waist - all suggest they are a
ladies’ dress item.
Does anyone have a photograph of the belt being used this
way? If so it would definitely identify them for what they are.
An alternative suggestion is that they were made by the
regiments for Indian servants to wear on formal occasions
but if so the waist would suggest they were worn by young
boys.
Jon Mills
cdwardens@yahoo.co.uk
living there when his father
died - but it’s rarely that
simple. It’s all tied up with
the highly complex system of
‘settlement’, which defined
the parish (and therefore the
poor law union) to which an
individual ‘belonged’. The
process was set out in a
number of Acts of Parliament,
principally, the 1834 Poor
Law Amendment Act, but as
the rules changed over the
years and were frequently
subject to the interpretation
of individual poor law
officials, it’s never easy to
be certain where to look for
records.
I would begin with a
search for records of the
Edmonton Poor Law Union.
The originals are held by
the London Metropolitan
Archives and some are
available online at Ancestry.
co.uk.
There is a wealth of
useful information on Peter
Higginbotham’s excellent
websites www.workhouses.
org.uk and www.
childrenshomes.org.uk. DA
Brickwall
special
In search of twins
0 I undertook a
small search for a
friend of mine, not
realising that it would be as
challenging as it has become!
I am told that Henry and
Thomas Dyer were twins,
born about 1862/1863 in the
Woking area of Surrey. There
is also the possibility that they
were triplets and that there
was a girl (no information
about her).
Thomas and Henry first
appear on the 1 881 Census,
age 1 8, where they are
‘Shop Lads (Mess)’ at High
Street, Ealing with Old
Brentford, boarding with
Alfred Matthews, cabinet
maker. They go on to become
carpenters/cabinet makers.
Thomas married Rebecca
King on 20 May 1 885 at
March, Cambridgeshire, in
the Centenary Baptist Chapel.
His father is shown as Henry
Dyer, clerk, deceased. Henry
married Emily and his father is
shown as Edward Dyer, clerk.
I can find no birth record of
them as twins and no record
of them together on a census
or baptism - nothing before
1 881 . There is no record
of a baptism in Woking or
contiguous parishes (Surrey
Heritage Centre, Woking).
There is a possibility that their
births were never registered. It
is also possible that they were
Nonconformist and that any
baptism was some time after
the birth.
Is there anything obvious
that I have missed?
Jacqueline Hewitt
jaccahewitt@btinternet.com
A I searched for a birth
registration or baptism
anywhere in Britain
for Henry and Thomas Dyer
and for an entry in the 1871
Census. Like you, I drew a
complete blank.
My next thought was that
since they give different
fathers on their marriage
certificates the fathers
might be twins and the
boys therefore first cousins,
born around the same time.
However, I couldn’t find
anything to support this: no
Edward or Henry Dyer in the
right area around the right
time.
Another aspect I
investigated, given your
mention of triplets and a
sister, was that either Henry or
Thomas had a twin sister and
the other boy was an ordinary
sibling. I got no further with
this either.
It seemed likely, therefore,
that Henry and Thomas were
registered under a different
surname, either because they
were born before their parents’
marriage or because their
father died when they were
very young and their mother
remarried.
Despite searching for twins
- either brothers or brother/
sister - under other surnames
I couldn’t find anything that
seemed relevant.
I next searched for all
entries in 1871 for the first
name Henry born 1862+/-2
years in Woking and all entries
likewise for Thomas then I
cross-checked the surnames.
I found three matches: Collins,
Howard and Wilson.
Both the Collins and the
Howard Henry and Thomas
were found to be from
different families but the Henry
and Thomas Wilson were
Can you help?
Suffragettes,
suffragists & artists
I write on all
M aspects of
the women’s
suffrage movement and
would dearly like to hear
from any FT reader who
holds a collection of
family papers relating to a
‘suffragette’ or ‘suffragist’
ancestor. Over and above
that general interest, I am
also researching in detail
artists - women and men -
associated with the suffrage
movement. My website
womanandhersphere.com
gives full details of all my
research and publications
Elizabeth Crawford
e.crawford@sphere20.
freeserve.co.uk
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 Family-rree 83
in association with
YOUR Q& A ancestry. co.uk
indeed twins, aged eight
and bom Woking, living with
parents William and Fanny
Wilson in Clewer, Windsor.
But again I couldn’t make
any progress. There were no
birth registrations for Henry
and Thomas Wilson and no
marriage of a William Wilson
to Fanny, so no maiden name.
The only positive note was
that I couldn’t find them as
Wilson after 1881. Fanny was
shown as born in Guildford
so I looked for a baptism for
a Fanny Dyer in Guildford
around 1827, but again no
success.
It all seemed yet another
dead end but browsing
on the surname Dyer and
birthplace Woking brought
up an entry for an 11 -year-
old servant, Elizabeth Dyer,
in Windsor, just a stone’s
throw from the Wilson family,
and she too was born in
Woking. Just three years
older than the twins, she
could be the unknown sister
and this surely couldn’t be
a coincidence? I tried to
identify Elizabeth and found a
birth registration for Elizabeth
Dyer in the March quarter of
1861 in the Guildford district.
There was also an 1861 entry
for four-week-old Elizabeth
with parents and siblings.
Sadly this also proved a dead
end as this Elizabeth Dyer
was still at home with her
family in Woking in 1871.
As a last-ditch effort I
looked in the 1861 Census
for entries for the first name
Fanny born around 1827
in the Woking area on the
grounds that if the twins were
born there in 1862/1863 then
she would have to have been
near there in 1861.
One hit seemed to throw
up coincidences. The
Cathery family in Woking was
headed by father Edward
who was a railway clerk and
the name and occupation
matched Henry’s marriage
certificate, which gave his
father as Edward Dyer, clerk.
There was also a daughter,
Elizabeth Cathery, aged one
and born in Woking to match
the 1871 Windsor Elizabeth
Dyer. The wife, Fanny, was
born around 1827 in Clandon,
which is near Guildford so
would fit the Windsor Fanny
Wilson. But what would a
Cathery family have to do
with the names Dyer and
Wilson?
There was no marriage for
Edward Cathery to Fanny,
so no means of knowing her
‘maiden’ name, and Edward
died in 1864. There were nine
children across the 1851 and
1861 Censuses with evidence
of an earlier marriage for
Edward. The children from
the second ‘marriage’ were
William, Fanny, Harriett and
Elizabeth so I looked for birth
registrations for these. I could
hardly believe it when Fanny’s
birth registration showed her
to be Fanny Dyer Cathery!
And just after the census
there were two other Cathery
births in the index: Henry
and Thomas on consecutive
pages in the December
quarter of 1862!
The last piece of the jigsaw
Can you help?
Kendrick Girls’ School, Reading
O Following on from the publication of my book
Exmouth’s Rolle (see FT September ‘Reviews’ or
email rollecollege@yahoo.co.uk for further details)
I am currently researching Kendrick Girls’ School, Reading
(my old grammar school), so, if any readers have memories
of that school (their own or those of family members), I would
be very pleased to receive them at the email address below.
Daphne Barnes-Phillips
kendrickbook201 7@yahoo.co.uk
Can you help?
Seeking Devonshire soldier’s birth
O A member of curiousfox.com suggested that I
write to FT regarding my quest, which is as follows:
Charles Henry Jackson was a captain in the 86th
(Royal County Down) Regiment of Foot and was stationed
at: Gibraltar (1864-1866); Gibraltar/Port Elizabeth (S Africa)
1867; Mauritius 1868; Mauritius/Cape of Good Hope 1869;
Mauritius 1870; Mauritius/Cape of Good Hope 1871 ; Cape
of Good Hope 1872-1874. He remained in South Africa and
married Johanna Reneira Catherina Cloete in 1874. 1 have a
photo of his headstone in the Wynberg Cemetery, Wynberg,
Western Cape, which gives his date of birth as 6 June 1838.
I have his South African death notice, which indicates he
was born in Devonshire, and died 17 May 1905 in Vredenhof,
Wynberg, Western Cape, South Africa at the age of 66 years
and 1 1 months, and lists all his children, one of whom is
my wife’s grandfather. He appears to have played a lot of
cricket for the 86th regiment! I have searched for a birth
in Devonshire without any luck, and have not found any
references to him in the UK census records.
He was promoted to ensign on 3 July 1858 and lieutenant
on 20 February 1863 according to The New Annual Army List,
Militia List, and Indian Civil Service List, 1 871 and had 1 3
years service on full pay at that time.
I am looking for his birth, birth place, or baptism and
ancestry, if anyone can help.
Paul Tanner-Tremaine
paul@tantrem.com
then fell into place with the
baptism of Fanny Dyer in
West Clandon on 4 May
1828 to James and Sarah
Dyer. James Dyer married
Sarah Elizabeth Christmas
on 20 February 1810 in West
Clandon.
So the twins, Henry and
Thomas, were registered
as Cathery, recorded as
Wilson in 1881 because
they were living with William
Wilson and then, like their
sister Elizabeth, decided to
be known by their mother’s
surname of Dyer. ME
Royal Marine death
0 1 am trying to find
the death certificate
of an ancestor who
died in Shanghai, China in
1860. He was John Glover
and born in Hampshire in
1824. He enlisted in the Royal
Marine Artillery in 1 824 at
Portsea. In the 1851 Census
he was a bombardier, as
he was when he married
on 6 March 1 852. He was a
corporal by the time his son
was born in 1855, and died
a sergeant on 1 6 July 1 860.
I believe at the time Britain
was involved in the Chinese
Opium War, which ended in
October/November of that
year, with the looting of the
Summer Palace at Peking.
Any suggestions as to finding
details of his death would be
much appreciated.
Maureen Smith
13 Swift Close, Eastleigh,
Hants SO50 9LD
A I don’t think you will
find a General Register
Office (GRO) death
certificate for a Royal Marine
who died fighting overseas in
1860, as the military kept their
own records of casualties.
Royal Marines were part of the
Royal Navy.
However, all is not lost!
There are nominal rolls of the
casualties that occurred during
the wars with China that were
84 Fami]y-riee Christmas 2015
www.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
Your questions answered
compiled by the War Office.
The rolls for 1860 can be
found at TNA in references
WO 32/8230, WO 32/8234,
and WO 32/8233. They
haven’t been digitised, so you
must visit TNA to see them.
If he died as a result of the
fighting you should at least
discover the battle in which
he died.
The Admiralty also kept a
general index of men who
died in service between 1854
and 1911. This is register
ADM 104/144, which you
can download from the TNA
website for free, so it may be
worth searching this at home
first.
However, it is possible that
John did not die in action.
If this is the case his death
may have been recorded by
one of the civil processes by
which British deaths abroad
were documented. Try looking
at the records for deaths
of Britons abroad at www.
bmdregisters.co.uk. These
records include series RG 32
through to RG 36 from TNA,
which have been digitised.
Once you’ve looked
in the above sources. I’d
recommend you contact
the Royal Marines Museum
in Portsmouth www.
royalmarinesmuseum.co.uk
as they may be able to add
details to the circumstances
of John Glover’s life or death.
They have a variety of books,
diaries, photographs, and
other documents that may
help you, and who knows
even perhaps something
specifically about John Glover
himself. The museum is
located in the very barracks
where your ancestor was
probably based so it would be
worth a visit for that reason
alone. SW
Royal Artillery
This is a photograph
J of Stephen
Whitehouse, my
wife’s grandfather. He
volunteered to serve in the
ww w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
The leather bandolier and
white lanyard on the left
shoulder were commonly
worn by all branches of the
RA during the war.
Army in the 1 91 4-1 91 8 war
and suffered from malaria and
died aged 50. 1 would like to
know whether you can tell
me what regiment he served
in; what rank his uniform
indicates; and any other
information.
Roy Bratby
roy.bratby@bratbyonline.com
A Stephen is dressed
in the standard khaki
service uniform
that was used by the Army
throughout the war. His cap
badge shows that he belongs
to the Royal Artillery (RA). At
this time, the RA badge was
worn by three separate corps,
the Royal Horse Artillery
(RHA), Royal Field Artillery
(RFA) and Royal Garrison
Artillery (RGA). Stephen is
dressed as a dismounted
soldier, usually indicating
a member of the RGA (the
mounted men of the RHA and
RFA were generally equipped
with spurs and close-fitting
breeches rather than trousers).
Stephen has no visible badges
of rank, and therefore he
appears to be a gunner, the
artillery equivalent of a private.
TL
Chelsea pensions
0 1 have recently
received interesting
correspondence from
the Western Front Association
that mentions a ‘Chelsea
Number’ and I would like to
know what this means.
My father-in-law was only
a private in the Army so
would not have qualified for
the Chelsea Hospital and I
know he went back to live in
Stepney. Over the years I have
seen this annotation many
times and thought it referred to
Chelsea Pensioners but I now
think it must mean something
entirely different to that school
of thought. I know that my
father-in-law was awarded the
Silver War Badge (SWB).
Derrick Reynolds
d.reynolds@sky.com
A At this time, the Royal
Hospital Chelsea
administered pensions
both for ‘in pensioners’ -
the well-known ‘Chelsea
Pensioners’ who were resident
at the Hospital - and for ‘out
pensioners’ - the majority
of ordinary Army pensioners
who received their pensions
where they lived. The Chelsea
number was an administrative
reference that applied to each
pensioner in both of these
categories.
Army pensions could be
awarded for long service
or for disability. Being a
private was not a barrier to
receiving a pension in either
category. The SWB was
awarded to men who were
honourably discharged from
the Army. The most common
cause of discharge in these
circumstances was being
‘no longer physically fit’ for
service, therefore there is
a strong possibility that the
holder of a SWB could have
been awarded a disability
pension. TL
Highland laddie
O In FT November
201 4 issue, you
kindly dated my
daguerrotypes of Charles and
Elizabeth Ellis. I now have
another query concerning a
painting believed to represent
their son, William Barton Ellis,
born in November 1845 in
Manchester. I haven’t seen the
original picture, which is in the
United States, so I only have
the scans, plus a handwritten
note dated May 1 924 (see
overleaf). Reportedly William is
aged three years old, and the
note describes how the dog
taught him how to walk. If his
age is correct, the date would
be 1848/9. William’s parents
were appointed as governor
and matron at Ashton Fever
Hospital in November 1847:
they are recorded there on
the 1851 Census, but William
wasn’t with them - only his
two younger brothers. I found
William, aged five, ‘lodging’
in 1851 with Henry and
Sarah Machin at Ivy Cottage,
Macclesfield, Cheshire. I
cannot connect the Machine to
the Ellis family and in fact am
struggling to find any record
of them. However, the picture
seems to show a rural location
with the plants and flowers
and this might make sense as
Macclesfield would have been
much ‘greener’ than inner city
Manchester or Ashton-under-
Lyne. What does look puzzling
and a little worrying to me is
the dress and hat look quite
Scottish!
Denise Psaila
denmar@go.net.mt
Christmas 2015 Family’rree 85
in association with
YOUR Q& A ancestry. co.uk
A lt is lovely to see an
original artwork this
month, as we have
just examined the subject
of family paintings and
drawings in a special feature
(FT December 2015 issue).
This simple but charming
image appears to be a
watercolour painting and
its rudimentary execution
strongly suggests that it
was created by an amateur
artist. By the Victorian era,
there was a significant vogue
for creating watercolour
scenes and many females
tried their hand at such
painting, although naturally
such past times were mostly
associated with the educated
leisured classes.
You mention that tradition
strongly links this picture
with a particular ancestor
and I can confirm that the
little figure here is indeed a
small boy. He is dressed as
an unbreeched male infant
in the knee-length frock
usual for young sons before
they were put into breeches
- a rite of passage usually
celebrated at about four
years of age. The style of his
frock, featuring a wide boat
neckline, fitted bodice with
short sleeves and full skirt is
typical of the 1840s or early
1850s, his short stockings or
socks and delicate shoes also
characteristic of this period.
Therefore I see no reason to
query the hypothesis that he
is William Barton Ellis, aged
three. As you say, William
must have been pictured
here in late 1848, or probably
1849. Admittedly, it can be
hard to tell little girls and boys
apart in Victorian portraits but
this child has short hair. His
appearance also displays the
kind of picturesque ‘Highland’
features then very popular for
male infants - here a checked
or quasi-tartan dress fabric
and a Scottish feathered
bonnet. Such fashion details
reflect the trend set during
the later 1840s and 1850s by
Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert, who loved the Scottish
Highlands.
Knowing that William
Barton Ellis may not have
been living at home when
he was painted suggests
a plausible context for this
picture. I agree that the green
mound and extravagant
plants depicted here evoke a
rural setting, and you feel this
could indicate a location near
Macclesfield. If so, I believe
that the elusive Sarah Machin
may have been the artist
responsible. Perhaps William
was sent to her at Ivy Cottage
for health reasons and this
intimate portrayal of him with
the dog would have served
to record her young charge’s
development: quite possibly
the picture was sent to his
parents. JS
Hanged at Newgate
0 1 think my 4x great-
grandfather Russell
Farmer (born in
1765 in Harefield, I believe)
was hanged outside Newgate
prison on 20 May 1 795. He
stole bank notes to the value
of £30 from an envelope
he was supposed to stamp
while working for the Post
Office in London. I have found
details at Oldbaileyonline.
org (tinyurl.com/pbqtwq4)
and Londonlives.org (tinyurl.
com/otacbap). Could you
tell me a little more about
what might have happened
to his widow Mary and three
children, Russell, Mary Ann
and Henry, and whether there
would be huge stigma around
this for her? Also where did
they bury people hanged at
Newgate; where I might find
more records (newspapers?)
and anything else that might
help me establish whether
or not he is ‘mine’ and in the
process learn
a little history?
Lastly, I’d like to
know whether
As explained in Jayne’s article (FT
December), many girls from genteel
families learned basic drawing and
painting as part of a classical education
and enjoyed capturing domestic and
local subjects.
M
% . ■.* ■ J ^ . r
. 1 .'
/v
y i ^
condemned prisoners were
required to write a will.
E Rothman
eclaireir@aol.com
A The main online
newspaper
resource is www.
britishnewspaperarchive.
co.uk (and also available
via findmypast.co.uk).
There are others such as
the Gale Digital Collections
gdc.gale.com available
primarily to libraries rather
than to individuals. These
tell less information than
you got from the Old Bailey
Online and LondonLives. (I
searched for Russell and
also Ruffell - an essential
tip for anyone using sources
that have been scanned
from old typefaces, which
used the long letter ‘s’.) The
only nugget I can add is that
the Northampton Mercury of
Saturday 23 May 1795 page
2 said that at the execution
Farmer and the other
condemned men ‘conducted
themselves with all due
decorum becoming their
awful situation’. The truth
is that such convictions
and executions were so
tyj / i
(
.7 X ■vi'-.i:- /
y-irrr.- rjj '
- M
f ■ ' T ./
' 1
- H ^
86 Family-riee Christmas 2015
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frequent as scarcely to make
the news. However, there
are many papers not in the
archives I have mentioned.
Papers local to the criminal
might be a good bet.
The Old Bailey Online
records show that Farmer
lived in Newington Causeway
south of London Bridge,
where he kept a shop and
apparently employed seven
or eight men. This was part
of Surrey then. The parish
boundaries are tricky but I
think this is Southwark, or
just possibly Newington.
Surrey records should be
consulted at the Surrey
History Centre. They may
also have something about
any poor law relief for
Farmer’s family, as well as
more Surrey newspapers.
The next story in the Old
Bailey Online about James
Pepperdy also sheds light on
Farmer. Pepperdy too worked
at the Post Office and
evidently led Farmer astray.
His guilt seems much more
obvious than Farmer’s and
he also is clearly the leader
in the attempt to launder the
stolen money through the
Huntingdon Bank. With these
criminal cases it is often
helpful to look at other cases
tried at the same time.
To answer the rest of your
questions you need to read
round the subject. Recent
books on Newgate include
Stephen Halliday’s Newgate
(Sutton Publishing, 2006),
and Kelly Grovier’s The
Gaol (John Murray, 2008).
From these I learned that
executions at Newgate were
relatively recent in 1795; it
was only in 1783 that the long
procession to execution at
Tyburn (near Marble Arch)
was discontinued.
Some of those executed
at Newgate were buried in
quicklime within the prison,
though I think this applied
only to the more notorious.
Some ended up as cadavers
!^f}Oui our exfjerk
Mary Evans has
been researching
her family tree
for more than 30
years, contributed
to research on TV
series ‘Who Do You
Think You Are?’
and Julian Fellowes’
‘Great Houses’, and is a regular
contributor to FT and our forum,
where she especially enjoys
tackling brickwalls.
Jayne Shrimpton is
a professional dress
historian, portrait
specialist and ‘photo
detective’. She is
photograph consultant
for TV series ‘Who Do
You Think You Are?’ and
her latest books are Tracing
Your Ancestors Through Family
Photographs and Fashion in the
1940s (2014). Find her online at
www.jayneshrimpton.co.uk.
Tim Lovering
has worked widely as
an archivist and
historical researcher,
and developed an
interest in genealogy
through his archive work.
He has had a lifelong
interest in British military history.
David Frost’s interest in
genealogy was sparked
by the unexpected
appearance of an
illegitimate and distinctly
dodgy family member in
1967. He’s been writing
on genealogy topics since
1991.
for study by medical students
at the College of Surgeons
and various hospitals. But
some had relatives who could
buy the body back for decent
burial - Grovier records a
charge of 14 shillings (70p)
for this.
As to making a will,
it seems there was no
encouragement to prisoners
to do so. I cannot find that
Russell Farmer made a will,
but there are other Farmers
in the Southwark area (eg
John Farmer, Hop Factor of
Southwark, 1819), whose wills
would be worth looking at in
TNA (available online, www.
nationalarchives.gov.uk). RM
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 FamUyrree 87
Simon Wills quizzes
Ivan Fowler who is part
of a research project that
suggests Edward II was
‘deported’ not murdered.
the Apennines of Pavia in northern
Italy. Prison-breaks were not rare in
those swashbuckling times. Historians
know a group of conspirators broke
Edward II out of prison in the months
preceding his supposed death, but he
was recaptured. The powerful baron
Roger Mortimer drugged the guard
of the Tower of London and escaped
down a rope ladder in 1323.
Alternatively, Edward IPs captors
themselves may have staged his
death and moved him to Corfe to
prevent fresh attempts to free him.
A group of conspirators - including
the Earl of Kent and the Archbishop
of York, William Melton - plotted to
free Edward II from Corfe
Castle in 1330. The Eieschi
Letter (see top question on
p87) indicates he escaped
independently, and travelled
disguised as a pilgrim. This
was not unusual either.
Richard the Lionheart
travelled in disguise, for
example, just as Edward
III passed himself off as a
commoner on numerous
occasions.
Project team member: Ivan Fowler.
northern Italy. Here, Edward II may
have retreated to live out his life as a
recluse, after escaping his enemies in
England. The team’s website reveals a
lot more detail at theauramalaproject.
wordpress.com/about, but I caught
up with Ivan to ask him some key
questions, and to hnd out if Family Tree
readers could help.
Q How do you think Edward II
might have been ‘allowed’ to
escape?
Ivan: Considerable evidence suggests
Edward II actually escaped from
Berkeley Castle, first to Corfe Castle in
Dorset, and then to Europe, reaching
TL : X . rk-. h. M
What really happened to Edward II? In this detail, Edward
is enthroned, while another figure offers him a crown.
Four generations of the Auramala Project team.
T he recent media interest in
the life and death of Richard
III has helped to focus
attention on other medieval
English monarchs. Edward II, for
example, was an unpopular king
with an enduring reputation for weak
rule, who was reputedly murdered in
Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, in
1327. However, increasing evidence
suggests this conclusion may be
unsound. Ivan Eowler is part of a team
investigating Edward’s fate under the
title. The Auramala Project. Auramala
is the ancient name of modern day
Oramala, a spectacular but remote
castle in the Apennines of Pavia in
in
88 Family Christmas 2015
w ww.f am i ly-t ree.co. u k
Images: Edward II manuscript courtesy of the British Library, CCO 1 .0 Universai (CCO 1 .0) Pubiic Domain Dedication; Berkeiey Castie,
courtesy David Stoweii iicenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Aiike 2.0 Generic iicence.
Questioning accepted truths
!A.[}oiA{{fte auffior
di Butrio there is a medieval grave
that, according to local folklore, is the
grave of a fugitive king. Around 1900
it was opened, and a skull fragment
found. Royal or ‘saintly’ skeletons
of the time were often broken up by
relic hunters or for other reasons.
For example, exactly the same part
of Charlemagne’s skull was separated
from the rest of his skeleton and
placed in a reliquary in the 1340s.
Unfortunately, the bone in question is
jumbled together with other medieval
bones of the Abbey, so we will have
quite a job identifying it, but we have
forensic scientists and geneticists in
the team, ready to set to work.
Q Are you interested to hear from
people who are descended from
Edward II?
Ivan: Extremely interested! Craig
Foster, a research consultant at
FamilySearch’s Family History Library
in Salt Lake City, Utah, is currently
helping us track down descendants.
The important thing is that you
must be descended from Edward II’s
mother, Eleanor of Castille, in a direct
mother-to-daughter line. This means
you will carry the same mitochondrial
DNA as Edward IT
• Please contact Family Tree?, editor
Helen Tovey if you think you belong to
this line: helen.t@family-tree.co.uk. FT
can connect you with Ivan’s team.
Team member Enrica
Biasi researching in
Milan State Archive.
and more historians are coming to
agree with him, most notably Kathryn
Warner in her recent biography
Edward IT. The Unconventional King,
who states that he most likely died
at the Abbey of Sant ’Alberto di
Butrio in the Apennines of Pavia. We
now know of at least six hrst-hand
sources claiming that Edward II lived,
against just one claiming he died.
Kathryn Warner’s blog sums up this
evidence: edwardthesecond.blogspot.
it/ 2 0 0 7/ 1 0/o ddit ie s-in-nar r at ive - o f-
edward-iis.html. Our research team is
painstakingly examining thousands of
medieval sources in Italy to see if the
available evidence confirms or negates
the theory. So far, everything we have
seen supports the Fieschi Letter.
Q Are there any remains of Edward
II that may allow DNA testing?
Ivan: At the Abbey of Sant ’Alberto
The purported tomb
of Edward II at
Sant’Alberto di Butrio.
w w w.f am i ly-t ree. co . u k
Christmas 2015 Family 89
Q Has this theory about the king
attracted academic interest,
and do you have any documentary
evidence to support the concept?
Ivan: In the 1870s a renowned French
historian, Alexandre Germain,
discovered the Fieschi Letter, the
medieval document detailing Edward
IPs journey across Europe towards
the Apennines of Pavia. For more
than a century, English historians
attempted to dismiss this letter
without ever giving an explanation
for it that htted all known facts.
Recently, well-known British historian
and writer, Ian Mortimer, staked his
career on showing that Edward II did
not die in Berkeley Castle, and that
the Fieschi Letter cannot simply be
dismissed out-of-hand. Naturally, he
met a great deal of resistance from
the academic establishment, but more
Did Edward die at Berkeley Castle or escape
from it?
Dr Simon Wills is a genealogist
and author with more than 25
years’ experience of researching
his ancestors. He has a particular
interest in maritime history and his
latest book is Voyages from the Past
(Pen & Sword, 2014). He is also
author of How Our Ancestors Died
and of the historical novel Lifeboatmen.
LETTERS
mailbox
Battling with English brickwalls, thoughts of a
young genealogy addict, and further views on
the pitfaiis and vaiue of online trees...
English brickwalls
& Czech success
The FT November cover (the silhouetted
hands fitting jigsaw pieces together
superimposed on the word ‘Brickwalls’)
struck me as very apposite! When you hit
a genealogical brickwall, sometimes the
only course of action left is to sift through
many jigsaw pieces in the hope of picking
up the right one. But in England, where
each little piece costs £9.25 to see before
you’re even sure that the piece belongs
to the puzzle you’re working on, this can
be too expensive for most people, so that
brickwall remains standing tall.
I am fortunate that one quarter of my
ancestry is Scottish so can search for
and download unofficial copies of register
entries from scotlandspeople.gov.uk at
much lower cost and without the wait!
More fortunate still, half of my ancestry
is from Nordmahren (Moravia), part of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now
within the Czech republic.
When I started my research more than
15 years ago I had resigned myself to
never getting beyond the oral history
from my grandparents, who were forced
to move to Germany during the post-
World War II expulsion of Sudeten
Germans. There were even stories of the
Russians having ransacked churches and
desecrated tombstones well before the
1938 Munich Agreement.
However, five years ago I discovered
the online archives of the Olomouc region
of the Czech Republic at vademecum.
archives.cz/vademecum/searchlink, a
massive collection of church registers,
land records and more, much of which
has been digitised and is free to view and
download!
OK, so there are no searchable indexes
and I’ve had to learn the Czech names
of villages (not to mention the archaic
German Kanzieischrift handwriting) and
pore over thousands of faded pages,
but that has made the research all the
more enjoyable. I estimate that the Czech
records I have looked at over the last five
years would have cost me over £40,000
(yes, forty thousand!) to see as official
English certificates!
I have now pieced together a very
detailed history of all of my Moravian
ancestors’ families back to the early
1700s. So here’s a heart-felt thank
you and congratulations to the Czech
authorities for setting an example of how
to make historical public records truly
accessible to the public!
If any would like to look at an abridged
version of my family history research,
they can find it at myweb.tiscali.co.uk/
pgwgart/page.
Paul Geissler
page@bas.ac.uk
Young family history addicts
My mother had been an avid family history
researcher since she was a teenager and it
had always puzzled to me why she spent
hours on the computer, gazing intently at
copious documents. It was only when,
about five years ago, I found myself -
aged 12 - peering over Mum’s shoulder
that I too got the bug, and it hasn’t left me.
When I reflect back onto why my
obsession started, I cannot remember.
I know that the detective work and
challenge appealed, or perhaps it was
immersing myself into the lives of my
ancestors, reading about the lifestyles of
different generations.
There is so much to discover no
matter who you are. If you are like me, it
could be uncovering an alleged suicide
in mid-Wales, marital affairs resulting in
illegitimate children and royal connections.
Not to mention changes of identity in the
Indian military and intrepid women on
transatlantic adventures. You name it, I
have no doubt got it.
I do often wonder why not many of my
generation have realised the joys of family
history. It has certainly been one of the
most rewarding things in my life to date,
and the lack of interest in it by the younger
community is something that disappoints
me. I do not know anybody else who did
genealogy for their Duke of Edinburgh Award,
or who has trekked the Welsh countryside
in the rain specifically to find a grave. I do
not know anybody who truly knows where
they came from. I’d like to encourage people
of all ages to find out about the wonder
of genealogy, because otherwise they are
missing out on the experience of a lifetime.
Megan Harrison
megan.e-harrison@hotmail.com
www.charliiandmegsblog.wordpress.com
Pining for the past
Diane Lindsay’s column ‘Forgotten Footsteps’
(FT November) struck a real chord with
me. I live just outside of Christchurch, New
Zealand, and we had a series of devastating
earthquakes in 201 0 and 201 1 . Most of
the central city as we know it has changed
and we have lost the majority of our old
and not-so-old buildings. Venturing into the
central city now brings a feeling of not being
in my home town. So much has changed I
might as well be somewhere else. All the old
landmarks have gone and a sense of panic
ensues when I realise I have no idea where I
am. Gradually new buildings are being built
and temporary structures are being replaced.
I can sympathise with Diane’s sense of being
robbed. I can no longer see or go into the
buildings that my parents, grandparents,
great-grandparents and great-great-
grandparents would have known. My children
will never know the city that I once knew.
I now have a better appreciation of what it
must have been like to be bombed.
Retina Danenberg
tina.dan@xtra.co.nz
Copycat trees
Well done to Noreen Watson for raising the
issue regarding the horrors of online trees
(FT November).
I find it hard to believe that people who are
interested in seeking their ancestors, take so
little effort in doing any actual research - it
would appear that one person enters a tree
and everyone else copies it, regardless of
whether it is correct. This is pretty obvious as
the script on them is word for word. If you try
90 P^amily^tee Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
to contact the contributor it is extremely
unlikely you will receive a reply. I have
even offered to send them copies of
certificates. Friends have informed me that
they have sat at their computer and in one
evening have found their complete family
history, dating back to medieval times. (So
far mine has taken 12 years of meticulous
research via parish registers complete
with documentation and is still ongoing).
On the positive side, there are trees that
have been correctly sourced from which
valuable information can be found, so it’s
not all bad. But we should all remember
than just one error can mean that an entire
branch of your family tree is worthless.
Pat Nash
grannynash@btinternet.com
Online trees continued
I too have noticed recently a great deal of
incorrect information being repeated ad
nauseam online.
I might be wrong but I don’t think
this was the case five or so years ago
when I was lucky and got in touch, via
an online tree, with people in the USA,
Australia, India and the UK, who sent
me databases, old photos and memoirs
and - in two cases - detailed family
histories published privately years before,
which have all added enormously to my
research and been such fun! I have met
up with several of the other researchers in
person and in some cases visited family-
related locations with them. I now have
photos of most of my great-grandfather’s
1 1 siblings and was even sent a photo of
a sampler made by his wife, my great-
grandmother, when aged 1 1 . The most
poignant find was a photo sent via a
second cousin of my mother’s uncle who
was killed in France during the first month
of the First World War.
Philippa Brooker
philippa.brooker@gmail.com
The pens that ended WW2
Re the FT November news story, ‘Pen
that ended WW2 goes on display’, which
specifically refers to the pen that signed the
surrender on board the USS Missouri. In fact
there were no less than five (some accounts
even say six) such fountain pens used by
MacArthur during the signing ceremony. One
of them was gifted by MacArthur to US Lt
General Wainwright and another to Lt General
Percival of the British Army, both former
Japanese prisoners of war.
Graham Caldwell
gljcaldwell@ozemail.com.au
Research in Glasgow
For anyone considering research at the
Mitchell Library, I would just like to clarify
that while a £15 fee is required to access the
Registrar’s Genealogy Centre (including the
statutory civil registration records from 1855,
held in Edinburgh) - now found on Level
5, together with the City Archives Cffice,
and the ‘Glasgow Room’ - it is possible to
search other resources at the Mitchell without
incurring any fee at all!
Brian D Henderson
bdh@towersclark.plus.com
Leafing through his WW1
K memorabilia, Keith Gregson
is reminded of a fascinating
First World War story.
0)
O)
I
0)
D)
I
W hile rummaging through my collection of First World
War postcards I came across the one featured below.
It immediately put me in mind of a chilling tale I came across
some years ago in a manuscript intended for publication
but never published. It had been written by one of the first
sniper officers on the Western Front and ended up in the attic
of an antique shop in Carlisle. Cne of the tales the officer
told was of a ruined building similar to those featured in the
photograph. This building was in neutral territory between
the lines and the officer had decided to set up a sniper’s
nest on the top floor. He and his men sneaked in at night
time and prepared ‘the nest’. Experience taught them not
to take up occupation at once but to leave the completed
work and bide their time. Cn the following day the officer and
members of his unit sat in a trench and watched as the nest
was systematically destroyed by synchronised machine gun
fire from the enemy side. Their caution had been well founded
and no lives were lost.
When I published A Tommy in the Famiiy in 201 4, a
descendant of the sniper officer read it and got in touch so
I was able to return the manuscript to the officer’s family. A
truly wonderful piece of memorabilia!
The manuscript
found in an antique
shop, and the
postcard below.
Share your views with other readers on the FT letters pages. Contact us...
By post Letters, Famiiy Tree, 61 Great Whyte,
Ramsey, Huntingdon PE26 1HJ
By email
helen.t@family-tree.co.uk
• • • By forum
III
facebook.com/familytreemaguk
@familytreemaguk
www.family-tree.co.uk
Christmas 2015 Familyitee 91
JL
• Mapping the dead
See how drones are saving
fragile graveyard heritage.
• Centuries of poverty
Sifting through records to learn
about the lives of the poor.
• Ancient ancestors
Take your tree back in time to the
r. *priijiordial soup Snd view your
; roots in a different light.
Names and their variants
Don’t take your family surnames at face value - find out
more by studying all those various and variant spellings.
Family reconstruction
Roll up your sleeves and revolutionise your family history
with a key research technique as used by professionals.
Take it global
Explore your family history diaspora and engage
with distant relatives all over the world.
(Planned editorial content may be subject to change.)
Thursday
92 Family Christmas 2015
www.family-tree.co.uk
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history to solve puzzles. Member of New England Chapter of
Association of Professional Genealogists; holds Certificate in
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Correspondence Course student. Hourly rates. Liz Loveland,
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• AMERICA See Sovereign Ancestry, LINCOLNSHIRE
• AUSTRALIA AND UK family history research undertaken by
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• AUSTRALIA See Sovereign Ancestry, LINCOLNSHIRE
• AYRSHIRE & SOUTH WEST SCOTLAND. Experienced
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• BEDFORDSHIRE, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, HUNTINGDONSHIRE,
NORTHAMPTONSHIRE family and local history research undertaken
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• BEDFORDSHIRE See Sovereign Ancestry, LINCOLNSHIRE
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• BUCKINGHAMSHIRE Family and Local History Research.
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• BUCKINGHAMSHIRE and surrounding counties. Family and
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Christmas 2015 Familyrree 93
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• CAMBRIDGESHIRE and English records. What stories could
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• CORK CITY & COUNTY, Ireland in general. Rosaleen
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Christmas 2015 Familyrree 95
YOUR ADVERTS
ANCESTRAL RESEARCH
• NORTHAMPTONSHIRE and BEDFORDSHIRE family history
research. Friendly service by former Northamptonshire Record
Office archivist. Sue Comont, 137 Addington Rd, Irthlingborough,
Northants NN9 SUP; email: suecomont@hotmail.co.uk; website: www.
northantsfamilyhistory.co.uk
• NORTHUMBERLAND See Sovereign Ancestry, LINCOLNSHIRE
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• SCOTLAND See Sovereign Ancestry, LINCOLNSHIRE
• SCOTTISH ancestry researched. Friendly service by experienced
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• SCOTTISH research, minor to major. Friendly, enthusiastic service.
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• SCOTTISH research. Look ups, brick walls, full trees and WW1
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• SHROPSHIRE See Sovereign Ancestry, LINCOLNSHIRE
• SOMERSET & DEVON, CORNWALL & DORSET. Family history
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• SOUTH AFRICA Experienced researcher. Anne Clarkson, 17
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• WARWICKSHIRE, WORCESTERSHIRE, STAFFORDSHIRE,
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• YORKSHIRE ancestry research. All enquiries welcome. £10 per
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• YORKSHIRE See Sovereign Ancestry, LINCOLNSHIRE
• YORKSHIRE family history research undertaken, look-ups,
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96 Familyltee Christmas 2015
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Christmas 2015 Familyrree 97
THOUGHTS ON...
Picturing the past
It’s Christmas 1939...
As we celebrate
the release of the
1939 Register,
Diane Lindsay
pictures her
family during the
first Christmas of
World War II.
M y 1939 project
is thriving, and
is bringing my
family history
to life almost like a sci-h
hologram. Under close
focus Fm realising those
I thought of as getting on
in years were actually in
their prime. Folk who were
there but didn’t get to grow
old, or who lived just into
my lifetime, step out of
the shadows and become
intensely real in this spot-lit
fragment of time.
For a start, it’s cold, very
cold; the coldest winter
for 45 years. Frosts and
smoggy pea soupers turn
to black ice and blizzards
and by Christmas much of
the country is snowbound.
Blacked out, nights seem
darker than ever with no
street lights, shop windows
or public Christmas trees
after 5.26pm. Fuel and
money is tight, although
food isn’t yet rationed.
Hoarding, frowned upon,
means less to buy in the
shops. Traffic accidents rise
as people fumble their way
home from work on foot
or bicycle. Off set, there’s
the crunch of thick snow
underfoot and a smell of
sulphur rises as from many
city chimneys.
Enter my dad, just 19,
engaged to my equally
youthful mum and, while
There are tears in private
awaiting call-up, marking
time working on new
houses in the booming pre-
war car town of Coventry.
He’s full of himself, strong,
and very handsome. In later
years, he will brag about
sparring with Dick Turpin,
boxer brother of Randolph
who both worked on the
buildings. (It will take
me years to work out what
the highwayman did with
Black Bess while Dick was
running up ladders with a
hod full of bricks!)
Change scene: Mum is
lodging with Dad’s family in
their small terraced house,
along with his mother
and father, two sisters and
young brother. Mum is tiny,
sassy, and very pretty, with
big green eyes and a hgure
to die for; a real ‘Pocket
Venus’. Dad shares the big
attic with his brother who,
at seven, is considered too
young to leave his mother
for evacuation and Mum
shares a bed with my young
aunts. They all huddle
up together, teasing and
giggling until told in no
uncertain terms to shut up
and get off to sleep: ‘Don’t
you know there’s a war on?’
Next morning: Grandma
and Grandad are both 47,
he tall and broad with a
wrestler’s physique, she
small and built like a bird;
this comes as something of
a shock. I’ve never before
quite grasped he was once
the same age as my own
children are now. Yet here
he is, in shirt sleeves and
weskit, teasing his cheeky
daughters and soon-to-
be daughter- in-law with
shaving soap froth and
threatening them ‘Big as
you are’ with the shaving
strop that hangs by the
kitchen sink. And yet he
must know exactly what
horrors he around the
corner. He saw them just
over 20 years ago.
They keep up a cheerful
front, but there are tears
in private. I remember
my friend who seriously
contemplated shooting her
brother in the foot to keep
him home and another
who tells of the fear that
lay behind the gaiety, not
only for the men already
in France, but from the
terror invasion. The Home
Front might hope it will
all hzzle out somehow, but
my mother’s brother has
already seen action on the
River Plate.
Christmas Day: There’s
food a-plenty because
Grandad keeps chickens
and grows vegetables,
and Dad has half-inched
a small Christmas tree
from somewhere. There’s
a roaring hre in the front
and back rooms and small
ones in the bedrooms too;
Grandad’s brother is a coal
miner and his best friend a
coal man. Shillings from a
jar feed the gas lights and
there’s singing and jollity,
and card games and a word
or two, rather rude, in
defiance of Hitler.
Yes, it feels like watching
a play, in which the
characters are my own
family, so as the curtain
falls on another year of
fabulous family history,
all that’s left to do is raise
a small glass of port to
them, and all our readers
and wish you a very happy
Christmas. V*"
^A^ovti {fie auffior^
Diane Lindsay
discovered her twin
passions of family
history and English (and
her sense of humour)
while training as a
teacher and bringing up
three small children in
the 1 970s. She’s a writer ^ ^
and local and family historian
and, although retired, still teaches
anything to anyone who will listen.^
98 FamilyTtee Christmas 2015
Illustration: © Ellie Keeble iov Family Tree.
EXPLORE YOUR WORLD
ON THE EVE OF WAR
WITH THE RELEASE OF THE 1939 REGISTER YOU’LL
BE ABLE TO EXPLORE YOUR PAST LIKE NEVER BEFORE.
FIND OUT WHO WAS LIVING IN YOUR CITY, ON
YOUR STREET OR EVEN IN YOUR HOUSE IN 1939.
find my past.
• •
iritrSMiiKtiCnwith
National Archives
Visit www.findmypast.co.uk
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ANCESTORS WERE?
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